I now felt more comfortable, and renewed my visits, which, during Giovanni’s illness, I had discontinued, to the infected around me. My plan was each day at two o’clock to ride out on an ass. I approached them within ten or twelve feet, and saw only those who could come out of their tents or grottoes to me. The mode of cure (I mean theirs) was confined to a bleeding, if they had strength enough to go down to Sayda to a Turkish barber, who for twenty paras, or fourpence, immediately opened a vein in the arm: but, if too weak for that, nothing was done. For, although to many I gave pills, powders, and potions, and they accepted them, I have reason to think they were seldom used. Plasters on their swellings they would readily apply, and would show them, to convince me they had done so; but I never was aware that this or any other remedy changed much the event of the malady; nor did I find any preventive of use but keeping out of its way.[106]
Besides the preceding instance of manly resistance to disease, I had an opportunity of seeing another, as remarkable, in the case of a girl nine years old. I went to her on the fourth day of her illness, and, as she had many times when in health received paras from me in charity, I called her to me from the hut in which she was, with her father, mother, two brothers and sister, her mother and brother being as ill as herself. She tottered out, and presented a most aggravated example of affliction by the hand of the Almighty. She had a carbuncle, which occupied the right corner of her mouth, another over the jugular vein, and a third on her right instep, which made her hobble in her gait; and, added to all this, she stood under a burning sun of perhaps 130° Fahrenheit, parched with fever, whilst her head, she said, ran round, her limbs failed her, and, as she expressed it, she wished to eat, but could not. Her mother told me she had been delirious all the preceding night; and the husband added that his wife was suffering herself from two femoral swellings.
It will be recollected that, when the plague showed itself, the peasants were busied in the feeding of silkworms preparatory to their spinning; and that, when they were driven out of the village, they did not, on that account, abandon their worms. The family of Constantine, even in the midst of their calamities, made a hut near their cave, and fed and nourished the worms as usual, from their own mulberry trees, which were close by.[107]
Up to the first of June, there were every day fresh cases, after which they suddenly ceased; and, with the exception of a few deaths of those who had fallen ill in May, the daily reports were more consolatory.
Lady Hester’s fears were by this time somewhat abated, and I again re-entered the convent, from which I had now been excluded since the beginning of May.
If there were anything capable of relieving the irksomeness of such a confinement as that which we now suffered, it was the lively interest excited in us by the events which had recently occurred in Europe. On the 12th of June, the news of Buonaparte’s exile to the island of Elba reached the monastery, and extinguished, as it was then thought, the prodigious splendour of his career. It was remarkable that the first account of this decision of the belligerent sovereigns was communicated to us, not from our consuls on the sea-coast, but from Dayr el Kamar, through a priest of the country, who had received his information from his correspondent at Rome; and there were many circumstances which occurred, demonstrating that these Eastern countries maintained a constant and sure correspondence with the western world, and were early informed of the changes in it. The common people did not fail to picture the downfall of a usurper in the colouring borrowed from their own customs, and he was said to have been carried about Paris in an iron cage, like Bajazet.
On the 14th of June, arrived in the port of Sayda H.M. sloop of war the Kite, commanded by Captain T. Forster, who came up to the convent, and had a long and private conversation with Lady Hester. He almost immediately sailed again to the south, and on the 22nd returned.
It appeared afterwards that her ladyship had required the assistance of a ship of war from Sir Robert Liston, to be enabled to ascertain the state of the ruins of Ascalon, preparatory to certain excavations proposed to be there made, by authority from the Porte, in search of hidden treasures; and that Sir Robert Liston had despatched Captain Forster with orders to act according to Lady Hester’s instructions. When Captain Forster quitted Sayda the first time, he went thither, reconnoitred the shore, and found it unfit for landing.
Although there was no wind, whilst moored behind the reef of rocks, which forms the haven of Sayda, the sloop rolled her gunwales under water. The presence of Captain Forster and the officers of the Kite was a source of enjoyment scarcely to be conceived by those who have not, like us, suffered for so long a period a total privation of the society of their countrymen. After stopping a week, they left us. On the 20th of June, a slight shock of an earthquake was felt.
On St. John’s day, the 24th of June, the Franks of Sayda opened their houses, and no fresh cases of plague happened afterwards. From a list of deaths, kept by M. Bertrand, to whom the whole population of the place was known, it appeared that 360 persons had fallen victims to it. How little are those reports, inserted in the European journals, to be relied on, by which a city, like Cairo or Damascus, is made to lose 2000 or 3000 a day; so that, in one month, in which the virulence of the disease is at the highest, the total loss would amount to more than the total population. It would be a fair average to reckon, in a most severe plague, the proportion of deaths at one to one thousand inhabitants per day. Thus, in Malta, the maximum was sixty a day: and 60,000 may be calculated as the population of La Valetta. So, for Sayda, where the maximum was eleven a day, the same ratio would perhaps hold just. In Abra, twenty persons died in forty days, and the number of families being forty, with five persons belonging to each family, gives a population of two hundred.