PLAGUE IN INDIA. 823 



A PLAGUE A'lLLAGE OF JULLUNDUR. 



The particular villa^ie which I am about to describe had a past his- 

 tory of phi^ue. but I am uiuible to give it, as the Punjab gov^ernment 

 does not tabuhite and print its returns from vilhiges, as the Bom- 

 bay government has done from the beginning. Its popuhition was 

 about 3,000, and it had h)st al)()ut '2M) by phigue in the months of 

 March and Ajjril preceding (1904). The greater number of those 

 deaths had come from a square bk)ck of houses (and from one or more 

 like it) which had the most remarkal>le construction that I saw any- 

 where in India. It was literally a hive of some thirty or forty mud 

 cells. A narrow passage ran around the square, with doors at inter- 

 nals in the dead wall. Entering by a door near a corner of the 

 i-quare one came into a room, which somehow held a cow or bullocJv 

 us well as the family, and had a hatch-like opening in the flat roof 

 with a ladder to ascend by. On reaching the roof one found that it 

 was a continuous expanse of thirty or forty small squares like those 

 of a chessboard, marked olf from each other only by ridges of mud, 

 which one had to step across in walking a distance of some thirty or 

 forty yards to descend by another ladder at the opposite corner. 

 Each of the thirty or forty square roofs had a round hole in the 

 middle, invariably covered by an earthenware cap like an inverted 

 flowerpot. Close to this mud block, separated from it only by the 

 ()-foot passage, Avas a group of ten or fifteen brick houses two and 

 three stories high, with windows, balconies, and the usual features 

 of the pakka houses of towns; this was the only masonry quarter of 

 the village, holding about a twentieth of the population. I could not 

 learn whether its residents had escaped altogether the infection which 

 was so violent in the mud block next to it, but it was certain that most 

 of the plague cases had been in the latter, or in another like it, 

 some cells being pointed out in which as many as four persons had 

 died. Most or all of the apartments were now retenanted, and there 

 had been no sign of a revival of the infection down to the middle of 

 January lasit. In another village, at the other end of Jullundur dis- 

 trict, I mounted the roof of a block of houses in the Mohannnedan 

 quarter, thinking to find a continuous expanse like the former, but in 

 that instance there were cattle pens and one or two alleys in the midst 

 of it. 



PLAGUE IN THE NEW VILLAGES OF THE CHENAB COLONY. 



Having been told that the. new regulation villages of the Chenab 

 and Jhelum colonies had had plague in them equally with the old 

 Punjab villages, which was not at all Avhat one would have expected 

 in recently occupied sites, I visited both colonies to see how the matter 



