Corpse Bearer, General Cemetery, Lima
Beyond the pantheon are some fine mausoleums, that of the Goyeneche being remarkable. The cadavers are not sequestered in the tombs, but in niches in vaults underneath reached by a descending flight of stairs. The niches rent for six soles for two years ($1.50 a year) and in them are deposited the remains of those whose means are limited. A white marble slab generally covers the front of the niche. On these slabs are designs, differing but little from each other in originality. The paintings on the slabs are black and depict a willow tree on one of whose branches sits an owl. Beneath the tree in attitudes of prayer and mourning are shown several human beings grouped about a corpse lying on a couch. The infant mortality in Lima must be great as is evidenced by the number of fresh cement fillings over the niches that are just large enough to permit the coffin of a child to be placed in the aperture. I witnessed several burials of poor children. The father, mother, and a few relatives appear at the cemetery carrying a coffin, smoking cigarettes, and apparently no more absorbed with grief than if a pet dog or cat had died. A cemetery employee relieves them of their load and finds a niche. He climbs upon some boards stretched across a pair of wooden carpenter's horses and slides into the hole that which had once been human. He then seizes a cement slab, many of which are lying about, having been especially manufactured for the cemetery to be used on such occasions, fits it in the niche end, and slaps over it a few trowelfuls of wet cement. A scratch on the cement with a pointed stick writes the name of the deceased infant and the date of its succumbing. The work of interring is so slipshodly done that swarms of insects, which delight in making repasts on the putrefying entrails of corpses, crawl through the cracks of the cement and seethe on the faces of the slabs. Some of these bit me and caused festering sores by their undetectable inoculation.
Putting a Coffin into a Niche, General Cemetery, Lima
In the west end of this cemetery is another pantheon, this one superb. In it are the sarcophagi of General Bolognesi, Admiral Grau, and other heroes of the Pacific War. It also contains the bones of the former presidents. Protestants, pagans, and freemasons are not interred in this cemetery.
Lima has a patron saint, Santa Rosa. She is also the patron saint of Callao. She was born in Lima, April 30, 1536, and devoted a life of purity to God. She died at the age of thirty-one years, August 23, 1567. She was canonized by Pope Clement X. in 1671.