Читать книгу The Story Teller of the Desert—"Backsheesh!" or, Life and Adventures in the Orient - Thomas Wallace Knox - Страница 80

We didn’t want to go ashore very much, and we couldn’t have gone very much if we had wanted to. There had been some cholera in Austria in the summer, and the Turkish government had established a quarantine against the Upper Danube. Had we chosen to land at Widin or any of the Turkish towns where the boat stopped we should have been taken with a pair of tongs and led into the quarantine station. We should have been smoked, and scorched, and physicked, and poulticed, and dosed for eleven days in a shed with a flimsy roof and flimsier sides, and with no floor, and with no companions beyond natives of the country, fleas, rats, and stray dogs. If we had survived it, we should have been let off at the end of that time to see the next poor wretch put through, and if we had fallen sick under the treatment we should have been sent to the hospital, which is about three times as bad as the quarantine. Altogether the quarantine was not seductive from an aesthetic point of view, and I determined to keep out of it. If any reader of this volume ever has the choice between a kettle of boiling oil and a Turkish quarantine I advise him to take the oil.

At all the landings where we stopped the officials made a great fuss to keep the loafers back, for fear they would take the cholera. We had no passengers for these landings, but we generally had letters, papers, and merchandise. Letters and papers were received with a stick or a pair of tongs and thrown into a tin box, which a boy instantly carried off to a sulphur fire, where its contents could be disinfected.