Although the plague had now spread terrible havoc around me, I did not see very plainly any corresponding change in the looks of the streets until the seventh day after my arrival.  I then first observed that the city was silenced. There were no outward signs of despair nor of violent terror, but many of the voices that had swelled the busy hum of men were already hushed in death, and the survivors, so used to scream and screech in their earnestness whenever they bought or sold, now showed an unwonted indifference about the affairs of this world:  it was less worth while for men to haggle and haggle, and crack the sky with noisy bargains, when the great commander was there, who could “pay all their debts with the roll of his drum.”

At this time I was informed that of twenty-five thousand people at Alexandria, twelve thousand had died already; the destroyer had come rather later to Cairo, but there was nothing of weariness in his strides.  The deaths came faster than ever they befell in the plague of London; but the calmness of Orientals under such visitations, and the habit of using biers for interment, instead of burying coffins along with the bodies, rendered it practicable to dispose of the dead in the usual way, without shocking the people by any unaccustomed spectacle of horror.  There was no tumbling of bodies into carts, as in the plague of Florence and the plague of London.  Every man, according to his station, was properly buried, and that in the usual way, except that he went to his grave in a more hurried pace than might have been adopted under ordinary circumstances.

The funerals which poured through the streets were not the only public evidence of deaths.  In Cairo this custom prevails:  At the instant of a man’s death (if his property is sufficient to justify the expense) professional howlers are employed.  I believe that these persons are brought near to the dying man when his end appears to be approaching, and the moment that life is gone they lift up their voices and send forth a loud wail from the chamber of death.  Thus I knew when my near neighbours died; sometimes the howls were near, sometimes more distant.  Once I was awakened in the night by the wail of death in the next house, and another time by a like howl from the house opposite; and there were two or three minutes, I recollect, during which the howl seemed to be actually running along the street.

I happened to be rather teased at this time by a sore throat, and I thought it would be well to get it cured if I could before I again started on my travels.  I therefore inquired for a Frank doctor, and was informed that the only one then at Cairo was a young Bolognese refugee, who was so poor that he had not been able to take flight, as the other medical men had done.  At such a time as this it was out of the question to send for an European physician; a person thus summoned would be sure to suppose that the patient was ill of the plague, and would decline