Data Entry De

An ash-gray dog with a white blaze on its forehead burst onto the rough

terrain of the market on the first sunday in December, knocked down tables

of fried food, overturned Indians' stalls and lottery kiosks, and bit four

people who happened to cross its path. Three of them were black slaves.

The fourth, Sierva Maria de Todos los Angeles, the only child of the

Marquis de Casalduero, had come there with a mulatta servant to buy a

string of bells for the celebration of her twelfth birthday.

They had been instructed not to go beyond the Arcade of the Merchants,

but the maid ventured as far as the drawbridge in the slum of Getsemani,

attracted by the crowd at the slavers' port where a shipment of blacks from

Guinea was being sold at a discount. For the past week a ship belonging to

the Compania Gaditana de Negros had been awaited with dismay because of an

unexplainable series of deaths on board. In an attempt at concealment, the

unweighted corpses were thrown into the water. The tide brought them to

the surface and washed the bodies, disfigured by swelling and a strange

magenta coloring, up on the beach. The vessel lay anchored outside the

bay, for everyone feared an outbreak of some African plague, until

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