Captain Skinner, in one of his Excursions, says arriving at the village
of Lugrassa, I thought there was an appearance of desolation about it. I
saw no people within the village, and observed merely a few stragglers
about the fields. Four or five men had died during the last week, and
some before: such mortality would depopulate a mountain city in a month.
Nothing can be more melancholy than a pestilence among these fragments
of humanity: cut off from their fellow-mountaineers by high ridges,
these isolated little communities are left to perish unknown and
unmourned.
I have learned from some natives, who have lately been at Badri Nath,
that that neighbourhood also has been ravaged by the cholera morbus.
They cannot check the disease: it seizes them in all situations--in
their houses--in the fields; and in a very few hours they are its
victims. As the most hardy fall first, the infants, deprived of their
protectors, should they escape the infection, must die of starvation.
The cattle are abandoned, the crops neglected, and every traveller shuns
the “city of the plague:” and even that precaution is no security.
Pilgrims die in agony on the road: to enter one of these little vales is
indeed to enter “the valley of the shadow of death.”--The inhabitants
resign themselves to their destiny: the same fate would await them in a
neighbouring village, perhaps, should they seek refuge there. They cling
to their homes to the last gasp; and the survivor of a once happy
people, where all were gay but a few days before, has to steal to his
grave unnoticed, or roam elsewhere for human intercourse. Could the
vision of “the Last Man” be ever realized, it would be in the highest
habitations of the Himalaya mountains; for there many a little world is
left for its last man to mourn over!
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