This instantaneous death, this lightning-stroke, remained an awesome mystery to me. It was only later, very much later, that I learnt the secret of the slaughter-house, at a time when, in the course of my promiscuous reading, I was picking up a smattering of anatomy. The man had cut through the spinal marrow where it leaves the skull; he had severed what our physiologists have called the vital cord. To-day I might say that he had operated in the manner of the Wasps, whose lancet plunges into the nerve-centres. Let us watch this spectacle a second time, under more exciting conditions: I mean, in the saladeiros of South America, those immense establishments for killing and treating meat, where they slaughter as many as twelve hundred Oxen a day. I will quote the account of an eye-witness: [55] ‘The cattle arrive in large herds and the matance begins on the day after the arrival. A whole herd is confined in an enclosed space, or margueira. From time to time men on horseback drive fifty or sixty beasts into a narrower and stronger enclosure, with a sloping floor of brick, boards or concrete, which is always very slippery. A special operator, standing on an outer platform which runs along the wall of the smaller margueira, lassoes one of the crowd of animals by the head or, more often, by the horns. The middle portion of the long, stout lasso is coiled round a windlass; and a draught-horse, or sometimes a pair of oxen, drags the lassoed beast along and makes it slide, in spite of its struggles, right against the windlass, where it is brought up with a thud and remains without power of movement. ‘Another assistant, the desnucador, also standing on the platform, has then but to stick a knife, at the back of the head, between the occipital bone and the axis; and the paralysed animal topples on to a trolley in which it is carted off. It is at once thrown on an inclined plane where other special labourers bleed it and skin it. But, as the injury to the cervical marrow varies a good deal in position and extent, it often happens that the unfortunate beasts still retain the motions of the heart and of the respiratory organs; and, in such cases, they suffer a reaction under the knife; they utter faint sounds of pain and move their limbs, while already half-flayed and disembowelled. Nothing could be more painful than the sight of all those animals skinned alive, cut up and transformed by those men, covered with blood, who run about in all directions.’