History of Sanitation

70 HISTORY OF SANITATION Distant View of Zempoala Aqueduct, Queretaro, Mexico ever, the devotees can and do sleep in the open air, camp- ing out in regiments and battalions, covered only with the same meagre cotton garment that clothes them by day. The heavy dews are unhealthy enough, but the great festi- val falls at the beginning of the rains, when the water tumbles in solid sheets. Then lanes and alleys are con- verted into torrents or stinking canals, and the pilgrims are driven into vile tenements. Cholera invariably breaks out. Living and dead are huddled together. In the numerous so-called corpse fields around the town as many as forty or fifty corpses are seen at a time, and vultures sit and dogs lounge lazily about gorged with human flesh. In fact, there is no end to the recurrence of incidents of misery and humiliation, the horrors of which, says the Bishop of Calcutta, are unutterable, but which are eclipsed by those of the return journey. Plundered and fleeced by landlords, the surviving victims reel homeward staggering under their burden of putrid food wrapped up in dirty clothes, or packed in heavy baskets or earthenware jars. Every stream is flooded, and the travelers have often to sit for days in the rain on the banks of a river before a boat will venture to cross. At all these points the corpses