Pilgrimages to the holy shrines, which drew together thousands of human beings without adequate shelter or food, also served to spread contagious diseases throughout the land. Perhaps the best picture of a pilgrimage which, while of a latter date, will still serve to show the unsanitary conditions when thousands of people are brought together without food or shelter, can be had from a report of Dr. Simmons, of the Yokahama Board of Health. In speaking of a latter-day pilgrimage in India, he says: "The drinking-water supply is derived from wells, so-called 'tanks' or artificial ponds and the water courses of the country. The wells generally resemble those of other parts of Asia. The tanks are excavations made for the purpose of collecting the surface water during the rainy season and storing it up for the dry. Necessarily they are mere stagnant pools. The water is used not only to quench thirst, but is said to be drunk as a sacred duty. At the same time, the reservoir serves as a large washing tub for clothes, no matter how dirty or in what soiled condition, and for personal bathing. Many of the watercourses are sacred; notably the Ganges, a river 1,600 miles long, in whose waters it is the religious duty of millions, not only those living near its banks, but for pilgrims, to bathe and to cast their dead. The Hindoo cannot be made to use a latrine. In the cities he digs a hole in his habitation; in the country he seeks the fields, the hillside, the banks of streams and rivers when obliged to obey the calls of nature. Hence it is that the vicinity of towns and the banks of the tanks and water courses are reeking with filth of the worst description, which is of necessity washed into the public water supply with every rainfall. Add to this the misery of pilgrims, then poverty and disease and the terrible crowding into the numerous towns which contain some temple or shrine, the object of their devotion, and we can see how India has become and remains the hotbed of the cholera epidemic." In the United States official report the horrors incident upon the pilgrimages are detailed with appalling minuteness. W. W. Hunter, in his "Orissa," states that twenty-four high festivals take place annually at Juggernaut. At one of them, about Easter, 40,000 persons indulge in hemp and hasheesh to a shocking degree. For weeks before the car festival, in June and July, pilgrims come trooping in by thousands every day. They are fed by the temple cooks to the number of 90,000. Over 100,000 men and women, many of them unaccustomed to work or exposure, tug and strain at the car until they drop exhausted and block the road with their bodies. During every month of the year a stream of devotees flows along the great Orissa road from Calcutta, and every village for three hundred miles has its pilgrim encampments.
Car of Juggernaut
The people travel in small bands, which at the time of the great feasts actually touch each other. Five-sixths of the whole are females and ninety-five per cent. travel on foot, many of them marching hundreds and even thousands of miles, a contingent having been drummed up from every town or village in India by one or other of the three thousand emissaries of the temple, who scour the country in all 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 complaint. 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 ventilation, 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 6½, 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, however, the devotees can and do sleep in the open air, camping 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 festival falls at the beginning of the rains, when the water tumbles in solid sheets. Then lanes and alleys are converted into torrents or stinking canals, and the pilgrims are driven into vile tenements. Cholera invariably breaks out. Living and dead are huddled together.
Distant View of Zempoala Aqueduct, Queretaro, Mexico
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 lie thickly strewn around (an English traveler counted forty close to one ferry), which accounts for the prevalence of cholera on the banks of brooks, streams and rivers. Some poor creatures drop and die by the way; others crowd into the villages and halting places on the way, where those who gain admittance cram the lodging-places to overflowing, and thousands pass the night in the streets, and find no cover from the drenching storms. Groups are huddled under the trees; long lines are stretched among the carts and bullocks on the roadside, then half saturated with the mud on which they lie, hundreds sit on the wet grass, not daring to lie down, and rock themselves to a monotonous chant through the long hours of the dreary night. It is impossible to compute the slaughter of this one pilgrimage. Bishop Wilson estimates it at not less than 50,000, and this description might be used for all the great India pilgrimages, of which there are probably a dozen annually, to say nothing of the hundreds of smaller shrines scattered through the peninsula, each of which attracts its minor horde of credulous votaries.