Then again the deep silence, the skurrying rats, the dim forms stretched every-where on the ground; and on either hand those open booths counterfeiting sepulchres, with counterfeit corpses sleeping motionless in the flicker of the counterfeit death lamps.  And now, a year later, when I read the cablegrams I seem to be reading of what I myself partly saw—­saw before it happened—­in a prophetic dream, as it were.  One cablegram says, “Business in the native town is about suspended.  Except the wailing and the tramp of the funerals.  There is but little life or movement.  The closed shops exceed in number those that remain open.”  Another says that 325,000 of the people have fled the city and are carrying the plague to the country.  Three days later comes the news, “The population is reduced by half.”  The refugees have carried the disease to Karachi; “220 cases, 214 deaths.”  A day or two later, “52 fresh cases, all of which proved fatal.”

The plague carries with it a terror which no other disease can excite; for of all diseases known to men it is the deadliest—­by far the deadliest.  “Fifty-two fresh cases—­all fatal.”  It is the Black Death alone that slays like that.  We can all imagine, after a fashion, the desolation of a plague-stricken city, and the stupor of stillness broken at intervals by distant bursts of wailing, marking the passing of funerals, here and there and yonder, but I suppose it is not possible for us to realize to ourselves the nightmare of dread and fear that possesses the living who are present in such a place and cannot get away.  That half million fled from Bombay in a wild panic suggests to us something of what they were feeling, but perhaps not even they could realize what the half million were feeling whom they left stranded behind to face the stalking horror without chance of escape.  Kinglake was in Cairo many years ago during an epidemic of the Black Death, and he has imagined the terrors that creep into a man’s heart at such a time and follow him until they themselves breed the fatal sign in the armpit, and then the delirium with confused images, and home-dreams, and reeling billiard-tables, and then the sudden blank of death: 

“To the contagionist, filled as he is with the dread of final causes, having no faith in destiny, nor in the fixed will of God, and with none of the devil-may-care indifference which might stand him instead of creeds—­to such one, every rag that shivers in the breeze of a plague-stricken city has this sort of sublimity.  If by any terrible ordinance he be forced to venture forth, be sees death dangling from every sleeve; and, as he creeps forward, he poises his shuddering limbs between the imminent jacket that is stabbing at his right elbow and the murderous pelisse that threatens to mow him clean down as it sweeps along on his left.  But most of all he dreads that which most of all he should love—­the touch of a woman’s dress; for mothers and