ORISSA. 455 of the cooking being often very bad. But, unfortunately, only a part of it is eaten fresh, as it is too sacred for the least fragment to be thrown away. Large quantities of it are sold in a state dangerous eren to a n in robust health, and deadly to the wayworn pilgrims, half of whom reach Puri with some form or other of bowel complaint. When examined after twenty-four hours, even in January,' writes Dr. Mouat, late Inspector-General of Jails, putrefactive fermentation had begun in all the rice compounds; and after forty-eight hours, the whole was a loathsome mass of putrid matter, utterly unfit for human use. This food forms the chief subsistence of the pilgrims, and the sole subsistence of the beggars who flock in hundreds to the shrines ciuring the festival. It is consumed by some one or other, whatever its state of putrefaction, to the very last morsel.' But bad food is only one of many predisposing causes to disease which the pilgrims have to encounter. The low level of Purí, and the sandy ridges which check the natural drainage towards the sea, render it a very dirty city. Each house is built on a little mud platform about four feet high. In the centre of the platform is a drain which receives the filth of the household, and discharges it in the form of black, stinking ooze on the street outside. The platform itself becomes gradually soaked with the pestiferous slime. In many houses, indeed, a deep, open cesspool is sunk in the earthen platform; and the wretched inmates eat and sleep around this perennial fountain of death. As a rule, the houses consist simply of two or three cells leading one into the other, without windows or roof ventilation of any sort. In these lairs of disease the pilgrims are massed together in a manner shocking to humanity. The city contains upwards of 6ooo houses, with a resident population in 1881 of 21,913 souls. But almost every citizen takes in pilgrims, and in 1869 there were not fewer than 5000 lodging-houses in the city. The scenes that formerly took place in these putrid dens baffle description. “I was shown one apartment,' says Dr. Mouat in the Report above cited, 'in the best pilgrim hotel of the place, in which eighty persons were said to have passed the night. It was 13 feet long, 10 feet 5 inches broad, with side walls 6} feet in height, and a low pent roof over it. It had but one entrance, and no escape for the efsete air. It was dark, dirty, and dismal when empty, and must have been a pesthouse during the festival. In this house occurred the first case of cholera in the last outbreak. If this be the normal state of the best lodging-house in the broad main street of Puri, it is not difficult to imagine the condition of the worst, in the narrow, confined, undrained back-slunis of the town.' About the time of the Car Festival, there can be little doubt that as many as 90,000 people were often packed for weeks together in the 5000 lodging-houses of Purí. At certain seasons of the year this misery is mitigated by sleeping
