History of Sanitation

HISTORY OF SANITATION 69 directions in search of dupes. When those pilgrims who have not died on the road arrive at their journey’s end, emaciated, with feet bound up in rags and plastered with mud and dirt, they rush into the sacred tanks or the sea and emerge to dress in clean garments. Disease and death make havoc with them during their stay; corpses are buried in holes scooped in the sand, and the hillocks are covered with bones and skulls washed from their shallow graves by the tropical rains. The temple kitchen has the monopoly of cooking for the multitude, and provides food which if fresh is not unwholesome. Unhappily, it is presented before Juggernaut, so becomes too sacred for the minutest portion to be thrown away. Under the influence of the heat it soon undergoes putrefactive fermentation, and in forty-eight hours much of it is a loathsome mass, unfit for human food. Yet it forms the chief sustenance of the pilgrims, and is the sole nourishment of thousands of beggars. Some one eats it to the very last grain. Injurious to the robust, it is deadly to the weak and wayworn, at least half of whom reach the place suffering under some form of bowel com- plaint. Badly as they are fed the poor wretches are worse lodged. Those who have the temporary shelter of four walls are housed in hovels built upon mud platforms about four feet high, in the center of each of which is the hole which receives the ordure of the household, and around which the inmates eat and sleep. The platforms are covered with small cells without any windows or other apertures for ven- tilation, and in these caves the pilgrims are packed, in a country where, during seven months out of twelve, the thermometer marks from 85 to 100 degrees Fahr. Hunter says that the scenes of agony and suffocation enacted in these hideous dens baffle description. In some of the best of them, 13 feet long by 10 feet broad and 6)^ feet high, as many as eighty persons pass the night. It is not then surprising to-learn that the stench is overpowering and the heat like that of an oven. Of 300,000 who visit Juggernaut in one season, 90,000 are often packed together five days a week in 5,000 of these lodgings. In certain seasons, how-