CHAPTER XXXI.
I.
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 m
