Page:The life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton (IA b21778401).pdf/60

30 The loss of the view of the Bay was a misfortune. The only amusement was prospecting the streets, where the most extraordinary scenes took place. It was impossible to forget a beastly Englishman, as he stood eating a squirting orange surrounded by a string of gutter-boys. The dexterity of the pickpockets, too, gave scenes as amusing as a theatre.

The lazzaroni, too, were a perpetual amusement. We learned to eat maccaroni like them, and so far mastered their dialect, that we could exchange chaff by the hour. In 1869 I found them all at Monte Video and Buenos Ayres, dressed in cacciatore and swearing "M'nnaccia l'anima tua;" they were impressed with a conviction that I was myself a lazzarone in luck. The shady side of the picture was the cholera. It caused a fearful destruction, and the newspapers owned to 1300 a day, which meant say 2300. The much-abused King behaved like a gentleman. The people had determined that the cholera was poison, and doubtless many made use of the opportunity to get rid of husbands and wives and other inconvenient relationships; but when the mob proceeded to murder the doctors, and to gather in the market square with drawn knives, declaring that the Government had poisoned the provisions, the King himself drove up in a phaeton and jumped out of it entirely alone, told them to put up their ridiculous weapons, and to show him where the poisoned provisions were, and, seating himself upon a bench, ate as much as his stomach would contain. Even the lazzarone were not proof against this heroism, and viva'd and cheered him to his heart's content.

My brother and I had seen too much of cholera to be afraid of it. We had passed through it in France, it had followed us to Siena and Rome, and at Naples it only excited our curiosity. We persuaded the Italian man-servant to assist us in a grand escapade. He had procured us the necessary dress, and when the dead-carts passed round in the dead of the night, we went the rounds with them as some of the croquemorts. The visits to the pauper houses, where the silence lay in the rooms, were anything but pleasant, and still less the final disposal of the bodies. Outside Naples was a large plain, pierced with pits, like the silos or underground granaries of Algeria and North Africa. They were lined with stone, and the mouths were covered with one big slab, just large enough to allow a corpse to pass. Into these flesh-pots were thrown the unfortunate bodies of the poor, after being stripped of the rags which acted as their winding-sheets. Black and rigid, they were thrown down the apertures like so much rubbish, into the festering heap below, and the decay caused a kind of lambent blue flame about the sides of the