316 



PLAGUE IN INDIA. 



creek of the sea in which it ends. Everything is built of stone. 

 There is an extensive ghat of dressed stone with steps doAvn to a pool 

 of the river. Facing the ghat is the village bazaar, the roadway 

 paved with stone, the houses of one, two, or three stories with stone 

 walls and tiled roofs, raised some 4 or 5 feet above the road on plinths 

 of dressed stone, and sometimes with stone steps below the plinths; 

 the houses of the bazaar in a continuous row with doors close to- 

 gether, but the rest of the village more dispersed along the main 

 road and side roads, at one point forming a hamlet, while another 

 part of the village is in scattered houses across the river. The 

 ground-floor rooms are as dark as they usually are in India, with a fire 

 burning on the floor at the far end. The cattle are usually in the 

 house, or in a veranda, but sometimes in a shed of the small compound. 

 So far as concerned the want of light and air, and the keeping of 



cattle indoors, these Konkan 

 village houses did not seem 

 to be worse or better than 

 elsewhere. Their masonry 

 construction, their high 

 plinths and paved roadways 

 were proper to a region 

 where stone is easily got and 

 where the heavy monsoon 

 rains — 100 inches average in 

 the year — make durable 

 structure necessary. T h e 

 other distinctive character 

 of the Konkan villages is 

 the more open order of their 

 houses and small home- 



a mile or more along one or both sides of a stream, some villages hav- 

 ing only one long paved street with a row of houses on either side, 

 like many of our own villages. This peculiarity of the Konkan vil- 

 lages can be seen everywhere upon the large scale maps of the 

 Kolaba and Ratnagiri districts (fig. 2). On the scale of 1 inch to 

 the mile it is possible to show the extent of the village site more 

 accurately than by the conventional dot or small circle or ordinary 

 maps. This lantern slide shows a bit of Ratnagiri district around 

 the head of one of the numerous creeks which run up. 20 miles from 

 the sea. It will be observed that the small squares, or rhombs, or 

 other geometrical figures, by which cartographers indicate home- 

 steads or clusters of houses, are peppered all over the surface, so that 

 the houses of one village along a stream almost join on to those of 



