National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
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Overland to India : vol.2 |
278 OVERLAND TO INDIA
CHAP.
then superintending the Persian customs on the frontier of Baluchistan. They were also officially instructed to assist
in checking the plague. After several difficulties they succeeded in their endeavours. They persuaded the
inhabitants to burn the clothes of the dead, their huts and D
household furniture, in fact, everything that had come in 0
contact with those who had been stricken by plague or died t
of it. In return, they distributed new clothes to the heirs, 1
and provided them with means of building new reed huts. 9
By these means they stopped the plague in its progress in 4
two of the above directions. ;
In the third direction things were worse. The plague J
was carried by thirty-eight fugitives from Deh-Seiyat-gur 9
to Pusht-i-Kuh-i-Khoja, where thirty-five of the fugitives y
died after letting loose the microbes in the latter village.
The corpses were buried, not in the village, but in a burial- ,r,
ground between it and Deh-gurg, situated farther to the east. i
A mollah and several relations from Deh-gurg attended 1
the funerals, and on returning to their village carried the 1
infection with them, and also infected all the camps and :i
villages on the way. The village Pusht-i-Kuh-i-Khoja i
is inhabited by Seiyats, but, unlike their northern fellow- :1
tribesmen, they marry outside the tribe, particularly with 1
the inhabitants of permanent villages in the delta country 1
on 1 the east. Therefore their connections came to be I
present at the interments. Pusht-i-Kuh-i-Khoja became, I
therefore, a secondary focus from which the plague con-
tinued its victorious march through the country. The I
small, poverty-stricken village Deh-gurg had only 170 i
inhabitants, and of these 150 had died at the time of my arrival in Seistan, but yet the 20 survivors remained in
the dreadful, infected village. Before I left I heard that these 20 were either dead or had left, and Deh-gurg was
empty and desolate.
Deh - gurg became, then, a third focus, whence the disease spread northwards to Daudeh, if this village did not receive a secondary immigration of microbes direct from Pusht. At any rate, the village had 45o inhabitants, among whom the plague raged most horribly. The people were opposed to European ideas, and permitted no preventive
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