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196 DAYS IN THE SUN
street corners. You could see large dogs walking
down the street with blunted senses, suddenly fall, stick
up their legs and die. As you walked through the
streets in the evening, you stumbled over their bodies,
and you found more at each street corner on the morn-
ing after. They were ultimately dropped into the
river through the trap door on the promenade and
floated out to the carrion-pit. Many of them ran out
of town and lay down in the ditches by the sides of the
promenades to die. There they remained, filling the
air with their stench. The rain and the waters of the
river finally disintegrated their corpses and fed foun-
tains and wells with the venom. When the cholera
came from the south across the Straits of Gibraltar, it
found a very favorable soil.
I continued up the river until the hills stepped into
the foreground, intercepted the Vega and transformed
it into a narrow gulley through which the river flowed!
Here in these foot-hills in old deserted river beds were
the dwellings of poor adventurers who were washing
gold. These men who would show the utmost re-
luctance to undertake any definite task yielding a sure
income were ready to work here eighteen hours a day,
the sweat pouring off them all day long. They were
taking a chance, and the chance was always pretty
uncertain. The work yielded but little profit each day;
yet there had been cases several times in the last
twenty years when a gold washer obtained fifty dol-
lars’ worth of gold in a single taking from the sand.
Such an incident furnished sufficient stimulus for a
whole generation.
On the bank of the river waved the high Spanish
reeds, and over the slopes of the mountain ascended
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