So Ross fed some of this malaria-mosquito soup to Lutchman, his servant, and almost danced with excitement as the man’s temperature went up--but it was a false alarm, it wasn’t malaria, worse luck.... So dragged the dreary days, the months, the years, feeding people mashed-up mosquitoes and writing to Manson: “I have a sort of feeling it will succeed--I feel a kind of religious excitement over it!” But it never succeeded. But he kept at it. He intrigued to get to places where he might find more malaria; he discovered strange new mosquitoes and from their bellies he dredged up unheard-of parasites--that had nothing to do with malaria. He tried everything. He was illogical. He was anti-scientific. He was like Edison combing the world to get proper stuff out of which to make phonograph needles. “There is only one method of solution,” he wrote, “that is, by incessant trial and exclusion.” He wrote that, while the simple method lay right under his hand, unfelt. He wrote shrieking poems called “Wraths.” He was ordered to Bangalore to try to stop the cholera epidemic, and didn’t stop it. He became passionate about the Indian authorities. “I wish I might rub their noses in the filth and disease which they so impotently let fester in Hindustan,” Ronald Ross cried. But who can blame him? It was hot there. “I was now forty years old,” he wrote, “but, though I was well known in India, both for my sanitary work at Bangalore and for my researches on malaria I received no advancement at all for my pains.” IV So passed two years, until, in June of 1897 Ronald Ross came back to Secunderabad, to the steamy hospital of Begumpett. The monsoon bringing its cool rain should have already broken, but it had not. A hellish wind blew gritty clouds of dust into the laboratory of Ronald Ross. He wanted to throw his microscope out of the window. Its one remaining eyepiece was cracked, and its metal work was rusted with his sweat. There was the punka, the blessed punka, but he could not start the punka going because it blew his dead mosquitoes away, and in the evening when the choking wind had died, the dust still hid the sun in a dreadful haze. Ronald Ross wrote: What ails the solitude? Is this the judgment day? The sky is red as blood The very rocks decay.