As soon as I had seen all that I wanted to see in Cairo and in the
neighbourhood I wished to make my escape from a city that lay under
the terrible curse of the plague, but Mysseri fell ill, in
consequence, I believe, of the hardships which he had been
suffering in my service. 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.
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