From Yunnan in China, from the clattering bright bazaars, crept something invisible in the sun and vigilant by dark, creeping, sinister, ceaseless; creeping across the Himalayas down through walled market-places, across a desert, along hot yellow rivers, into an American missionary compound—creeping, silent, sure; and here and there on its way a man was black and stilled with plague.
In Bombay a new dock-guard, unaware of things, spoke boisterously over his family rice of a strange new custom of the rats.
Those princes of the sewer, swift to dart and turn, had gone mad. They came out on the warehouse floor, ignoring the guard, springing up as though (the guard said merrily) they were trying to fly, and straightway falling dead. He had poked at them, but they did not move.
Three days later that dock-guard died of the plague.
Before he died, from his dock a ship with a cargo of wheat steamed off to Marseilles. There was no sickness on it all the way; there was no reason why at Marseilles it should not lie next to a tramp steamer, nor why that steamer, pitching down to Montevideo with nothing more sensational than a discussion between the supercargo and the second officer in the matter of a fifth ace, should not berth near the S.S. Pendown Castle, bound for the island of St. Hubert to add cocoa to its present cargo of lumber.
On the way to St. Hubert, a Goanese seedie boy and after him the messroom steward on the Pendown Castle died of what the skipper called influenza. A greater trouble was the number of rats which, ill satisfied with lumber as diet, scampered up to the food-stores, then into the forecastle, and for no reason perceptible died on the open decks. They danced comically before they died, and lay in the scuppers stark and ruffled.
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