As he approached Paris, riding through those vegetable-fields where steam rose from the still-hot shit of the city, he came upon a vast mud-yard, within sight of the city walls, streaked with white quick-lime and speckled with human skulls and bones sitting right out on the surface. Rude crosses had been stuffed into the muck here and there, and jutted out at diverse angles, spattered with the shit of the crows and vultures that waited on them. When Jack rode through it, those birds had, however, all flown up the road to greet a procession that had just emerged from the city-gates: a priest in a long cloak, so ponderous with mud that it hung from his shoulders like chain-mail, using a great crucifix as walking-stick, and occasionally hauling off a dolorous clang on a pot-like bell in the opposite hand. Behind him, a small crowd of paupers employing busted shovels in the same manner as the priest did the crucifix, and then a cart, driven by a couple of starveling mules, laden with a number of long bundles wrapped and sewn up in old grain-sacks.