When the disease first declared itself, the Press and its volunteer correspondents showed extraordinary ingenuity in denying its existence, in attempting to discount the seriousness of the situation and inventing euphemisms by which to describe the "glandular fever." But the authorities responsible for the health of the city appreciated the gravity of the prospect. The Municipality appointed a special sub-committee to investigate the causes of the epidemic and to carry out measures for its suppression; and Mr. Haffkine, the bacteriologist, was requisitioned from Calcutta to identify the bacillus. By the {162} end of October the accommodation available in the Municipal Hospital for infectious diseases was lamentably inadequate. Customs officers in foreign ports took alarm and imposed quarantine on all vessels from Bombay Port. Natives of all classes were terror-stricken, and many families fled up-country. Thousands daily streamed over the two causeways that connect the Island of Bombay with the mainland; vast crowds assembled at the Bunders and the railway-stations in their haste to get away by sea and rail. Before January was out, half the inhabitants had escaped, for it has been shown that the population fell from 797,000 on December 8 to 437,000 on February 8. At the same time the mortality reached alarming figures, showing 4,559 in December and 6,189 in January in excess of the normal death-rate duly corrected. Although January is the coolest and pleasantest month of the year, it proved the most disastrous; the outbreak reached its climax on the 15th and 16th, on which days 344 and 345 fatal attacks were recorded. The fires that burn inside the high walls that bound the Charni Road sent up a thicker smoke and a more suggestive stench than ever before. The price of wood for funeral pyres went up; in some cases Hindus consented to bury their dead, because they could not afford to buy the necessary timber. On January 18, 1897, an article appeared in _The Times of India_ seriously discussing the supply of vultures then inhabiting the Towers of Silence. The writer concludes {163} with the quaint phrase: "There are now nearly 400, the number being ample, even with the high death-rate now existing in the Parsee Community." [Illustration: Hindu burning-ghat] The General Officer Commanding was fully alive to the dangerous and insanitary condition of some of the older parts of the town. For the greater security of his household he took an airy house on Malabar Hill, instead of inhabiting the official residence in the Marine Lines. He further arranged for the Marine Battalion, which forms the permanent garrison of Bombay, to leave their antiquated huts in the same road and go out under canvas. Two English ladies living in the Marine Lines caught the plague, but fortunately both recovered. [Sidenote: A white man dies]