IIIF Color HighRes
National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
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| IIIF Color HighRes |
| Overland to India : vol.2 |
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Citation Information
LV
THE PLAGUE 279
measures. Therefore most of them died. According to one version, the infection was carried to Daudeh by a peasant who had been to Pusht to buy feathers and wildfowl.
When the epidemic had spread in all directions and
threatened the whole country, and when whole villages had died, the authorities were induced to draw a cordon of several hundred soldiers round the infected area to localise the pestilence, and cut off all connections. But Persian soldiers are well known. They had as little conception of the danger as the rest of the people, and did not obey their instructions. Two of them betook themselves to the unfortunate Daudeh, and ate their dinner in a house where a man had just died of plague. Both died. What can be expected of other people when the guard, instead of stopping the disease, contributes to its spread ?
Furthermore, the soldiers soon grew weary of this
service, and wanted to go to their homes in Eastern Persia. The authorities thoughtlessly gave way, and granted their request, and thus the whole country was exposed to danger. We afterwards heard reports of cases of illness in Turbet-i-
Haidari, but they fortunately turned out to be exaggerated. The plague reached Pusht in the beginning of January.
Now, when the cordon of soldiers had been removed, all Seistan lay open to the disease which spread by invisible means in all directions from village to village. At last it reached, three weeks before my arrival, the twin town Nasretabad-Husseinabad. Owing to superstition, suspicion
i of Europeans, and a reluctance to give an account of them-
selves and their affairs, Captain Kelly had met with great difficulties in his attempt to trace in detail the paths of the disease through the country, and many reports he had been unable to check. Nevertheless, he had been able to follow its progress in the main, and his plague map was of exceptional interest and of the very greatest value as a contribution to our knowledge of the disease. The villages on the lower Hilmend were still untouched, but they are separated from the infected country by an uninhabited region.
Captain Kelly said that no better geographical con-
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