131 
Harbour of Columho. 
It swells the body and legs of the patient to an enormous 
size, and generally carries him off in twenty-four hours. The 
method employed for the cure is to rub the patient over with 
cow-dung, oil, chinain, lime-juice, and other preparations from 
herbs ; and then bury him up to the chin in hot sand. When 
the legs only are attacked, although the disorder be the same, 
its name differs : a patient is then said to have elephant legs, 
from the resemblance their legs bear at that time to those 
of these animals. They are also called Cochin legs, from the 
disease being very prevalent among the natives of the place 
of that name on the Malabar coast, owing to the unwhole- 
some brackish water Avhich is drank there. 
The rainy season does not produce consequences so danger- 
ous to Europeans, although fluxes and bowel complaints are 
then much more frequent among them than during the dry 
weather. Our soldiers too, by drinking plentifully of arrack 
and smoking tobacco, counteract the bad effects of the at- 
mosphere and the water ; while the natives on the other hand 
live so abstemiously, few or none of them eating flesh, or 
drinking any thing but water, that Avhen once they are seized 
with these exhausting distempers, their constitutions want 
strength to resist them, and they usually fall victims. 
On the inside of the roads Avhere the larger ships anchor, 
and separated from them by a sand bank which stretches quite 
across it, lies a bay sufficiently commodious for the reception 
of small ships and domes, the country name for small sloops 
and decked boats. This bay forms a half moon on one side 
of the fort ; Avhich, by its projection into the sea, breaks the 
violence of the storms, and affords shelter from the south-west 
winds to the vessels moored here. The Avater on the bar is 
s 2 
