One extraordinary feature of the private _quintas_ or orchards and
plantations in the vicinity of the Saladeros was the walls or hedges.
These were built entirely of cows' skulls, seven, eight, or nine deep,
placed evenly like stones, the horns projecting. Hundreds of thousands
of skulls had been thus used, and some of the old, very long walls,
crowned with green grass and with creepers and wild flowers growing
from the cavities in the bones, had a strangely picturesque but
somewhat uncanny appearance. As a rule there were rows of old Lombardy
poplars behind these strange walls or fences.
In those days bones were not utilized: they were thrown away, and
those who wanted walls in a stoneless land, where bricks and wood for
palings were dear to buy, found in the skulls a useful substitute.
The abomination I have described was but one of many--the principal
and sublime stench in a city of evil smells, a populous city built on
a plain without drainage and without water-supply beyond that which
was sold by watermen in buckets, each bucketful containing about half
a pound of red clay in solution. It is true that the best houses had
_algibes,_ or cisterns, under the courtyard, where the rainwater from
the flat roofs was deposited. I remember that water well: you always
had one or two to half-a-dozen scarlet wrigglers, the larvae of
mosquitoes, in a tumblerful, and you drank your water, quite calmly,
wrigglers and all!
All this will serve to give an idea of the condition of the city of
that time from the sanitary point of view, and this state of things
lasted down to the 'seventies of the last century, when Buenos Ayres
came to be the chief pestilential city of the globe and was obliged to
call in engineers from England to do something to save the inhabitants
from extinction.
Pages:
306
307
308
309
310
311
312
313
314
315
316
317
318
319
320
321
322
323
324
325
326
327
328
329
330