and the principal barber of Damietta was among the first to die of
cholera; hence all the earliest records of deaths were lost, and the more
fatal and infective diarrhoeal cases were never recorded. Next the
principal European physician of Damietta had his attention called to the
rumors of numerous deaths, and investigated the matter, to find that
cases of cholera had occurred in May, whereas none had been reported
publicly until June 21. A _zadig_, or canal, runs through Damietta from
one branch of the Nile to another, and this is the principal source of
the water supply.

Mosques and many houses are on the banks of this canal, and their
drainage goes into it. Every mosque has a public privy, and also a tank
for the ablution, which all good Mohammedans must use before entering a
holy place. There was, of course, great choleraic water contamination,
and a sudden outburst of cholera took place. The 15,000 people who came
to the fair were stampeded out of Damietta, together with about 10,000 of
the inhabitants, who carried the disease with them back into Egypt. Then
only was a rigid quarantine established, and a cordon put round Damietta
to keep everybody in, and let no one go out, neither food, medicines,
doctors, nor supplies of any kind. Such is nearly the history of every
town attacked in Egypt in 1883.

When the pestilence had been let out _en masse_, severe measures were
taken to keep it in Cairo, for up the Nile was attacked long before
Alexandria suffered. This cholera broke out, as it almost always does in
Egypt, when the river Nile is low and the water unusually bad. It
disappeared like magic, as it always does in Egypt, when the Nile rises
and washes all impurities away. There had been little or no cholera in
Egypt since 1865, and there had often been as much filth as in 1883. It
has never become endemic there, as it is a rainless country and generally