384 PLAGUE IN INDIA. 



current. The penetration of the house by ground air is a peculiar 

 risk in India for several reasons. Where the walls are of mud, as 

 they are in the ^reat majority of plague villages, and have no ma- 

 sonry plinth to rest upon, their porous substance is really a part of 

 the soil, so that the inmates ha\e the ground air not only rising from 

 the floor, but carried up in the walls as if in a ventilating shaft. A 

 dwelling house warmed all day by the sun and by the fire kept up 

 for cooking becomes like an exhausted receiver for the ground air to 

 rise into. If one visits the old chawls at Bombay, in which there has 

 been so much plague, you find the narrow, dark rooms on the ground 

 floor to be heated like an oven even at 8 in the morning. 



The intuitive perceptions of the people correspond with the scien- 

 tific theory of a soil poison. They know that the chief risk of taking 

 plague is from spending the night in an infected place, and gener- 

 ally that they incur the greatest risk when confined most to the dwell- 

 ing houses by cold, domestic duties, or other cause. One very im- 

 portant thing I nnist pass over for want of time, namely, the inju- 

 rious effect of a high level of the ground water and of its seasonal 

 fluctuations in a filth-sodden soil. In the new chawls at Bombay, 

 built by the improvement trust, nothing seemed to me to promise 

 more for the future health than the solid masonry of the foundations, 

 floors, and passages. The advantages of concrete foundations have 

 been proved often in similar circumstances, although in Hongkong 

 they have been only a palliative in j^lague. 



PROBABLE FITITRE OF PLAGUE IX INDIA. 



I come lastly to the que-5tion. Is there anything to be learned as to 

 its probable duration from historical precedents and from its own 

 course during nine years? One was sometimes asked whether the 

 natural time for plague in India to last was not seven or eight years. 

 The origin of the idea is Avhat is recorded of two former plagues in 

 India — one in the reign of the Emperor Jehangir, IGIG, of which it is 

 said that " it continued to devastate the country for eight years," the 

 other in the reign of Aurungzeb, lOcSS, which '' lasted seven or eight 

 years." Each of these epidemics of bubonic plague is authenticated 

 twice over by good contemporary authorities, along with some inter- 

 esting particulars which I have no time to quote. The earlier of the 

 two l)egan in the Punjab at Lahore and '' destroyed many villages 

 and ]oarganas; "" the later, seventy years after, was felt most in Oc- 

 tober and Noveml)er, 1088, in the city of Bijapur, which Aurungzeb 

 had just cajitured and in which his army was encamped, including 

 15,000 cavalry; but it is said to have lasted seven or eight years and 

 to have extended over the Deccan and as far as Ahmedabad and 



