[Footnote 128: See the Author's observations, in a letter to Mr. Willis, in Gentleman's Magazine, February, 1805.]
In the month of April, 1799, a dreadful plague, of a most destructive nature, manifested itself in the city of Old Fas, which soon after communicated itself to the new city. This unparalleled calamity, carried off one or two the first day, three or four the second day, six or eight the third day, and increasing progressively, until the mortality amounted to two in the hundred of the aggregate population, continuing _with unabating violence_, ten, fifteen, or twenty days; being of longer duration in old than in new towns; then diminishing in a progressive proportion from one 168 thousand a day to nine hundred, then to eight hundred, and so on until it disappeared. Whatever recourse was had to medicine and to physicians was unavailing; so that such expedients were at length totally relinquished, and the people, overpowered by this terrible scourge, lost all hopes of surviving it.
Whilst it raged in the town of Mogodor, a small village, _Diabet_, situated about two miles south-east of that place, remained uninfected, although the communication was open between them: on the _thirty-fourth day_, however, after its first appearance at Mogodor, this village was discovered to be infected, and the disorder raged with great violence, making dreadful havock among the human species for _twenty-one_ days, carrying off, during that period, one hundred persons out of one hundred and thirty-three, the original population of the village, before the plague visited it; none died after this, and those who were infected, recovered in the course of a month or two, some losing an eye, or the use of a leg or an arm.
Many similar circumstances might be here adduced relative to the numerous and populous villages dispersed through the extensive Shelluh province of Haha, all which shared a similar or a worse fate. Travelling through this province shortly after the plague had exhausted itself, I saw many uninhabited ruins, which I had before witnessed as flourishing villages; on making enquiry concerning the 169 population of these dismal remains, I was informed that in one village, which contained six hundred inhabitants, four persons only had escaped the ravage. Other villages, which had contained four or five hundred, had only seven or eight survivors left to relate the calamities they had suffered. Families which had retired to the country to avoid the infection, on returning to town, when all infection had apparently ceased, were generally attacked, and died; a singular instance of this kind happened at Mogodor, where, after the mortality had subsided, a corps of troops arrived from the city of Terodant, in the province of Suse, where the plague had been raging, and had subsided; these troops, after remaining three days at Mogodor, were attacked with the disease, and it raged exclusively among them for about a month, during which it carried off two-thirds of their original number, one hundred men; during this interval the other inhabitants of the town were exempt from the disorder, though these troops were not confined to any particular quarter, many of them having had apartments in the houses of the inhabitants of the town.