(FROM THE “COSMOPOLITAN MAGAZINE.”)
MET the local inspectors at the railway station leading a horse which they had kindly provided for me. We made a tour of half a dozen villages, alighting to investigate anything that appeared suspicious. The first and largest of the villages rambles along on either side of a street scarcely wider than an ordinary footpath. The houses were mud huts, whitewashed, or built of a kind of rubble, with the roofs of loose tiles common in India. Cocoa palms were numerous all over the region, and there were solid groves of them outside the settlements, coming down to the water’s edge. The inhabitants for the most part professed the Roman Catholic faith; crosses stood at every meeting of the ways, and priests in black gowns with wide-brimmed black hats stole past us occasionally. Of native inhabitants, however, we saw very few; those who were not in the graveyards had locked up their houses and fled the town. All the houses in which death or sickness had occurred had been already visited by the inspectors, emptied of their contents and disinfected. Those which were still occupied were kept under strict supervision. One which had been occupied the day before was now found to be shut. The inspectors called up a native and questioned him. From his replies it appeared that there had been symptoms of the disease. We dismounted and made an examination. Every door and window was fastened, but by forcing open a blind we were able to see the interior. It was empty of life and of most of the movable furniture; but the floor of dried mud was strewn with the dead carcasses of rats. Undoubtedly the plague had been here. The house was marked for destruction, and we proceeded.
Low, flat ledges of rock extended into the sea. A group of creatures in loin-cloths and red turbans were squatting or moving about between two or three heaps of burning timber. These were made of stout logs piled across one another to a height of about four feet. Half-way in the pile was placed a human body; it was not entirely covered by the wood, but a leg projected here, an arm there. The flames blazed up fiercely, their flickering red tongues contrasting with the pale blue of the calm sea beyond. The smoke arose thick and unctuous, and, fortunately, was carried seaward. One of the pyres had burnt down to white ashes, and nothing recognizable as human remained. The people whose bodies were here burned had died in the segregation huts the night before.
RICHARD HARDING DAVIS.
ICHARD HARDING DAVIS has shown a marvelous skill in seeing the world, in travel, and of describing it as he sees it. He is not a profound student of the mystery of the human mind, but he possesses in high degree and in rare quality an instinct of selection, a clear sense of an artistic situation in a group of more or less ordinary circumstances and a gift in interesting description. He is, in short, a very clever newspaper reporter who has transferred his field of service from the region of the actual to the realm of the imaginary. His reputation, however, is about equally divided between his works of description and travel and his stories of a more imaginative order, though in both classes of writings, he is above everything else a describer of what he has seen.