CONCRETE DORMITORY AND NATIVE SHACKS.
In this tropical climate it is, of course, unnecessary to provide any means of heating the buildings. At the time of our visit a large amusement pavilion was nearly completed where moving pictures and other forms of entertainment will help pass the time for these poor wretches who have nothing to look forward to but a lingering death from a loathsome disease.
A large number of the patients who are in the incipient stages showed, to the ordinary observer, no effects of the disease. There were others who at first glance seemed perfectly normal, but on closer scrutiny revealed the absence of one or more toes or fingers. Others had horribly swollen ears: some had no nose left and were distressing objects; but it was not until we visited the various wards of the hospital that we saw leprosy in all of its horror. Here were dozens of cases so far advanced that they were no longer able to walk; they were lying on their cots waiting for death to come to their release. Some were so emaciated as to look almost like animated skeletons. Others, except for and sometimes in spite of their bandages, looked like horrid, partially decomposed cadavers. It was a sight to make one shudder and devoutly hope that a cure for this awful disease may soon be discovered. These extreme cases are cared for carefully and their last hours are made as comfortable as possible.
CONCRETE KITCHEN AND LAVATORY BUILDINGS AND NATIVE RESIDENCES.
As we came, out three Catholic sisters entered the women's ward to do what they could for the patients there.
Shortly before leaving the colony we were led to a small concrete structure (near the furnace where all combustible waste is burned), and as the door was opened we saw before us on a concrete slab four bodies so wasted and shrivelled that they seemed scarcely human. These were those who had at last been cured in the only way that this dread disease admits of cure. About forty per month are released by death, and those we saw were the last crop of the here merciful not "dread reaper."
At the back of the colony we met four lepers of incipient stages carrying a long box on their shoulders. Just as they came abreast of us they set it down, to rest themselves, and we saw that in the box was another "cured" leper. He was being carried to the cemetery not only "unhonored and unsung" but also "unwept": not a single friend nor relative followed his wasted body to its final resting place. After this pitiful spectacle, added to the horrors of the hospital wards, we were not sorry to turn our steps back toward the boat. As we passed through the fence at the "dead line," going away from the colony, we were compelled to wade through a shallow box of water containing a small percentage of carbolic acid which disinfected the soles of our shoes, the only things about us that had come in actual contact with the leper colony. In this way all visitors when they leave the colony are compelled, not to "shake its dust from their feet" but to wash its germs from their soles.
As an antidote for dissatisfaction with one's lot in life, or as an object lesson for the pessimists who claim there is no unselfishness in the world, or as an illustration of the value of the medical missionary, this little island, lying "somewhere east of Suez" between the Sulu and the China Seas, is not easily surpassed.