After A While He Recovered Sufficiently To Undertake A Journey, But Then There Was Some Difficulty In Procuring Beasts Of Burthen, And It Was Not Till The Nineteenth Day Of My Sojourn That I Quitted The City.

During all this time the power of the plague was rapidly increasing.

When I first arrived, it was said that the daily number of "accidents" by plague, out of a population of about two hundred thousand, did not exceed four or five hundred, but before I went away the deaths were reckoned at twelve hundred a day. I had no means of knowing whether the numbers (given out, as I believe they were, by officials) were at all correct, but I could not help knowing that from day to day the number of the dead was increasing. My quarters were in a street which was one of the chief thoroughfares of the city. The funerals in Cairo take place between daybreak and noon, and as I was generally in my rooms during this part of the day, I could form some opinion as to the briskness of the plague. I don't mean this for a sly insinuation that I got up every morning with the sun. It was not so; but the funerals of most people in decent circumstances at Cairo are attended by singers and howlers, and the performances of these people woke me in the early morning, and prevented me from remaining in ignorance of what was going on in the street below.

Enter page number Go  Previous Next
Page 209 of 325
Words from 57577 to 57828 of 89094