The pits are at the foot of the hill, open-mouthed in the uncut grass.

With famine in the city, with people dying at that very hour of starvation, there was no lack of dead, and both pits were filled to within a few feet of the surface.

Bodies are thrown in here without any covering, and hawks and crows strip them of their flesh, a mode of treating the dead grateful to the Parsee, but inexpressibly hateful to the Chinese, whose poverty must be overwhelming when he can be found to permit it.

Pigtails were lying carelessly about and skulls separated from the trunk.

Human bones gnawed by dogs were to be picked up in numbers in the long grass all round the hill; they were the bones of the dead who had been loosely buried close to the surface, through which dogs--the domestic dogs one met afterwards in the street--had scraped their way.