330 PLAGUE IN INDIA. 



There are no carriage ways through this region, but only a maze 

 of narrow alleys, with houses on either hand three or four stories 

 high, and innumerable temples — a perfect rabbit warren, like th^' 

 closes of the High street, Canongate, and Cowgate of Old Edinburgh. 

 What strikes one most in the not unexciting passage through this 

 maze is the solidity and durability of the structure everywhere. 

 The walls are of stone, the courtyards and floors are paved with 

 stone, the alleys are laid crosswise with long slabs of stone, which 

 form at the same time the roofs of a network of sewers. In this 

 dense mass of humanity, constantly mixing with pilgrims from all 

 parts of India, there has been hardly any plague. I make this state- 

 ment on the authorit_^ of the police inspector who accom})anied me, 

 as well as of the collector, Mr. Radice, who wrote as follows: "In 

 the five years we have had plague (this is tlie fifth) the pakka mahals 

 have been almost entirely free;" and in the sketch plan showing the 

 incidence of the infection on the several quarters of the city, which 

 he was good enough to make for me, he has marked only one small 

 spot in the riverside quarter, the (raighat, which had some plague in 

 1903. On the other hand, the mud-built suburbs and the villages to 

 the west of the city have had much plague; for examj)le, this year a 

 maxinnnn of nearly 400 deaths in a week in March. In driving 

 tlirough them one could tell at a glance Avhere the plague was likely 

 to have been; thus, on the way from the cantonment to the city, 

 a certain dip in the read is lined on both sides with mud houses of 

 exceptionally mean appearance, which is found, on reference to the 

 plan, to be the Tiliabagh, marked as having had plague ''every 

 year." 



CITIES OF THE NORTHWEST. 



In all the other cities of the northwest, which have had much 

 plague, there are extensive quarters of mud-built houses — in Alla- 

 habad, Cawnpore, Agra, Lucknow, Bareilly. In Lucknow, beauti- 

 fied as it is with palaces and fine houses, the relative extent of the 

 kaccha mahals seemed to be enormous, and the mud walls of so dusty 

 and friable a kind that the heavy rain of December had been break- 

 ing them down. Lucknow this year has had u]) to -fSO plague deaths 

 in a week, a ratio higher than Bombay. I shall give a single illus- 

 tration of plague in Agra. One of the patients in the jdague hospi- 

 tal, a convalescent, was a little girl, the sole survivor of a plague- 

 stricken family of nine. On proceeding with the assistant medical 

 officer to see the house where this tragedy had liai)pened, we found 

 it to be a dilapidated and abandoned nnid hut, one of a com])act group 

 of three standing at the roadside on the edge of a small pit, from 

 which the earth to build them had doubtless been dug. 



