A City Swollen With Dead

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Isabella
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A City Swollen With Dead

Post by Isabella »

http://bldgblog.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/ ... -dead.html

Some choice excerpts:

In other words, these tennis-playing nurses "capering about" on their grass tennis courts would occasionally and literally fall through the surface of the earth only to find themselves standing in a maze of rotting coffins hidden just beneath the soil, an infernal honeycomb of badly tended graves like something out of Dante.
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Of course, as London's population exploded, so too did the number of its dead; and, thus, some local churches got in on the financial action of corpse disposal by accepting dead bodies (and the high fees associated with their interment) only to do nothing at all with the corpses but toss them down into the cellar. One church was so bad, Arnold explains, that its parishioners would often become light-headed and even pass out from the horrible smell of rotting and partially liquified bodies wafting up from beneath the floorboards. The parishioners could even taste it, apparently: an acrid, oily slick on their tongues, resulting from the humid corpse-fog that filled the church, a kind of artificial weather system created by the dissolving bodies of the dead jumbled up in the darkness below them. Mind-bogglingly, when all of this was finally discovered, how many corpses do you think London city authorities found down there? Several dozen? A few hundred, perhaps? They found twelve thousand corpses. 12,000 corpses all turning into jello and contaminating the local water supply.

Yet those churchgoers were lucky to escape with their own lives, we read. At times, London's urban burial grounds simply exploded, their cheap coffins dangerously over-pressurized from within with corpse gas. The resulting blasts and long-burning subterranean infernos, for the most part limited to the crypts and basements of churches, were physically repellent and not at all easy to extinguish. "In the 1800s," Arnold writes, "fires beneath St. Clement Dane's and [architect Christopher] Wren's Church of St. James's in Jermyn Street destroyed many bodies and burned for days."
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But to put that another way, the ground was so solidly packed with the interlocked skeletons of 17th-century victims of the Great Plague that the Tube's 19th-century excavation teams couldn't even hack their way through them all. The Tube thus had to swerve to the side along a subterranean detour in order to avoid this huge congested knot of skulls, ribs, legs, and arms tangled in the soil—an artificial geology made of people, caught in the throat of greater London.
"No, but evil is still being — Is having reason — Being reasonable! Mousie understands? Is always being reason. Is punishing world for not being... Like in head. Is always reason. World should be different, is reason."
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Re: A City Swollen With Dead

Post by Gonzoron of the FoS »

Absolutely fascinating! And inspiring. Mwahahahah. Thanks!
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Re: A City Swollen With Dead

Post by Jonathan Winters »

That is really, really interesting.

Wow.

Bookmarked and added to my want list.

:)

Patrick.

Thanks!
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Re: A City Swollen With Dead

Post by High Priest Mikhal »

:shock: Okay. Note to self: Never travel to London. I knew the city was full of history but that kind of history.
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Re: A City Swollen With Dead

Post by The Giamarga »

Inspirational reading for Paridon ?
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Re: A City Swollen With Dead

Post by High Priest Mikhal »

The Giamarga wrote:Inspirational reading for Paridon ?
Didn't Timor replace the whole underground, sewers et al? Or did the marikith have themselves a necrophagic feast for a while?
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Re: A City Swollen With Dead

Post by Rock of the Fraternity »

High Priest Mikhal wrote::shock: Okay. Note to self: Never travel to London. I knew the city was full of history but that kind of history.
o_o I've... I've been to London. I thought it was great fun... Egad.
The Giamarga wrote:Inspirational reading for Paridon ?
I was thinking more of Necropolis, myself.
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