United States -- Description and travel; United States -- Social life and customs -- 1865-1918
As far as the eye can reach stretches a town-ship of cattle-pens,
cunningly divided into blocks, so that the animals of any pen can be
speedily driven out close to an inclined timber path which leads to an
elevated covered way straddling high above the pens. These viaducts are
two-storied. On the upper story tramp the doomed cattle, stolidly
for the most part. On the lower, with a scuffling of sharp hoofs and
multitudinous yells, run the pigs, the same end being appointed for
each. Thus you will see the gangs of cattle waiting their turn--as they
wait sometimes for days; and they need not be distressed by the sight of
their fellows running about in the fear of death. All they know is that
a man on horseback causes their next-door neighbors to move by means of
a whip. Certain bars and fences are unshipped, and behold! that crowd
have gone up the mouth of a sloping tunnel and return no more.
It is different with the pigs. They shriek back the news of the exodus
to their friends, and a hundred pens skirl responsive.
It was to the pigs I first addressed myself. Selecting a viaduct which
was full of them, as I could hear, though I could not see, I marked a
sombre building whereto it ran, and went there, not unalarmed by stray
cattle who had managed to escape from their proper quarters. A pleasant
smell of brine warned me of what was coming. I entered the factory
and found it full of pork in barrels, and on another story more pork
un-barrelled, and in a huge room the halves of swine, for whose behoof
great lumps of ice were being pitched in at the window. That room was
the mortuary chamber where the pigs lay for a little while in state ere
they began their progress through such passages as kings may sometimes
travel.
Turning a corner, and not noting an overhead arrangement of greased
rail, wheel, and pulley, I ran into the arms of four eviscerated
carcasses, all pure white and of a human aspect, pushed by a man clad in
vehement red. When I leaped aside, the floor was slippery under me. Also
there was a flavor of farm-yard in my nostrils and the shouting of a
multitude in my ears. But there was no joy in that shouting. Twelve men
stood in two lines six a side. Between them and overhead ran the railway
of death that had nearly shunted me through the window. Each man carried
a knife, the sleeves of his shirt were cut off at the elbows, and from
bosom to heel he was blood-red.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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