418 



THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



eyes. Those gaunt faces, those attenu- 

 ated bodies clad in a shagginess of filthy 

 rags, seemed centuries removed from civ- 

 ilization. You felt that you had stumbled 

 into prehistoric man's den during some 

 great famine year. 



THE HUMAN LEVELED TO BRUTE BEAST 



Suddenly a shriek went up and a 

 woman rushed out of her hut, with agon- 

 ized face and with hands lifted to heaven. 

 Hers was such abandonment as pro- 

 claims that death has struck the first- 

 born ; yet it was a tale of mere robbery. 

 What the captured thief delivered back 

 to her proved to be a paltry handful of 

 roots. And upon entering the woman's 

 house we found, in fact, her only daugh- 

 ter lying dead, not yet cold, while the 

 mother crouched dry-eyed before a tiny 

 fire, intently watching the pot wherein 

 bubbled those precious roots, her next 

 stomach ful. 



It was to have seen the soul dead and 

 the human leveled to the brute beast. 



Near by, in the open, fifty wizened 

 children sat about a long board, eating 

 the American Committee's daily dole of 

 boiled rice. This was accomplished at a 

 gulp; then the children scattered, search- 

 ing the ground as I had seen others do 

 beside our car at Alexandropol. Soon 

 one was chewing a straw, another the 

 paring of a horse's hoof, a third a cap- 

 tured beetle. 



One seven-year-old girl crouched by 

 herself, cracking something between two 

 stones and licking her fingers. The doc- 

 tor bent over, examining the object. He 

 asked with peculiar sharpness, "Where 

 did she get that — that bone?" 



The child looked -up with a scared, 

 guilty glance ; then her answer came 

 through the interpreter, who said in a 

 low voice, "Yonder in the graveyard." 



T am not sure that we preserved our 

 composure. 



STARVATION OUTRUNS TYPHUS 



We passed on, the doctor asking of 

 our guide : 



"Is there much typhus?" 



"Not so much now," was the rejoinder, 

 "for the reason that starvation is killing 

 them more quickly than typhus could." 



"What is the death-rate in the villages 

 hereabout ?" 



"I will give you a few instances. There 

 are some thirty villages in this district, 

 and a recent census showed 2,277 deaths 

 for a period of fifty days. Etchmiadzin 

 contains 7,000 refugees, of whom 1,000 

 are dying each month. At Evgilar a 

 population of 1,900 was reduced to 1,519 

 in ten days. During those same ten days 

 Alletly's 965 people were diminished to 

 612, and Atgamar's 2,093 people to 1,530. 



"In reality, the death-rate is much 

 higher than these figures indicate. We 

 cannot search every house once a day. 

 The best we can do is to send ox-carts 

 through the street each morning, so that 

 the people can bring out their dead ; but 

 often they are too weak to rise from their 

 beds for that purpose, and so the living 

 and dead remain lying side by side. Per- 

 haps a week-or two will pass before" 



"I understand," said the doctor, briefly. 

 "I also understand that American flour is 

 not yet arriving in sufficient quantities to 

 feed what must amount to half a million 

 starving people. Tell me, then, what 

 they eat beside mere roots ?" 



"Cats and dogs, for example. These 

 have been sold at thirty to fifty rubles 

 apiece. The other day a famished horse 

 dropped dead in the streets, and in half 

 an hour it was picked clean. And then — 

 yes, I have seen it myself, between dead 

 brother and living sister. She lay there 

 beside him and told me what she was go- 

 ing to do. I urged her against it, but 

 there was no bread to give her that day. 

 And later, when they called to remove 

 her brother's body, his right arm was 

 gone." 



GRAVES DUG WITH HUMAN BONES 



We had taken a short cut toward where 

 our car waited, and by chance we were 

 skirting the cemetery. Our guide pointed 

 thither and said : 



"It is not a pleasant sight. You must 

 understand that the Turks left this coun- 

 try so bare that there are not even spades. 

 Graves must be dug with any available 

 thing, even with human bones. If the 

 dead has a relative — some one who is still 

 strong enough to carry a weight — big 

 stones are placed on the grave; but if 

 not" He shrugged significantly. 



