THE LAND OF THE STALKING DEATH 



417 



tortuous, sun - beaten 

 byways no children 

 played and no animals 

 roamed. The air was 

 heavy with dreadful 

 silence, such as hangs 

 over plague - smitten 

 communities. 



We found the chil- 

 dren, such as they 

 were, inhabiting an 

 orphanage wherein 

 one sickened at pu- 

 tridity's horrible odor, 

 and were informed 

 that there were nei- 

 ther medicines nor 

 disinfectants where- 

 with to allay the con- 

 dition of the many 

 little sick-beds. 



Sick? Say, rather, 

 the bed - ridden — a 

 word which m ore 

 justly describes those 

 tiny, withered u p, 

 crone-like creatures, 

 upon whose faces the 

 skin seemed stretched 

 to a drumhead's tight- 

 ness ; whose peering 

 eyes shot terror and 

 anguish, as if Death's 

 presence were already 

 perceptible to them, 

 and who lay there at 

 Famine's climax of 

 physical exhaustion. 

 In those young, yet 

 grotesquely aged 

 faces, we seemed to 

 see a long lifetime of 

 tragedy packed into eight or ten childish 

 years. 



"They'll all die," was the brusque ob- 

 servation of the doctor, who had taken 

 one glimpse and gone out. "We can't do 

 them any good. Silly business, anyway, 

 to come out here in a broken-down car." 



"We will see now conditions of the 

 deads?" inquired our interpreter, sweetly. 

 "Twenty-five deads was took out of one 

 house here in one day. It is a big house, 

 or khan. There would be plenty more 

 deads in it by now." 



HIS PARENTS HAVE BEEN SLAIN : HE STARVES 



Armenia 

 subsisting on 

 or fields. 



The local 



of the American 



has thousands of such pitiable half-animals who are 

 •oots and any bits of refuse thev can rind in the streets 



Committee, having heard of our arrival, 

 turned up to greet us. With him we 

 walked through the local bazaar — rows 

 of mean shops that mocked starvation 

 with their handfuls of nuts and withered 

 fruit. 



The mud huts which we visited pre- 

 sented an invariable picture — a barren, 

 cave-like interior, lacking one stick o\ 

 furniture or household utensil, and with 

 a few bleached bones scattered here and 

 there. The occupants, stretched on the 

 clay floor, would half lift themselves to 

 regard us with dazed and questioning 



