But in many of the villages that I visited neither flood nor drought will matter for many years. Sand like the seashore had covered crops, and fields, and boundaries, and homes in one indistinguishable desert. At the first village I came to after my elephant had waded through the numerous shallow channels into which the river had now sunk, a crowd of naked people—two or three hundred, I suppose—had assembled round a Government agent who was issuing little doles of rice. Similar doles had been issued soon after the disaster three months before, but otherwise the people had received nothing from a fatherly Government, because rain was officially due, and they ought officially to have lived on the subsidiary crops nurtured by the rain. But the heavens did not comply with official expectations; cholera came instead, and now the people were dying, not, of course, from starvation, but from “bowel complaints.” At sight of me upon the elephant, the people left their doles and flung themselves prostrate upon the hot sand which had ruined them. Some brought hoes, and digging three feet down, they showed a few withered blades from what had once been a rice-field. To that thickness the sand lay over acres and miles of country along the low land beside the river, and now on the top of the sand the hungry villagers flung themselves flat in their appeal. Surely a man who rode an elephant and wore a helmet, and was white by courtesy, could save them! What could I do? There were 15,000 living skeletons ready to join in that prayer, and I had one pocketful of coppers. Rice was selling at 1½_d._ a pound; it takes two pounds a day to feed a man decently, and the full wage for a working cultivator was twopence in ordinary times. Where is charity when things are like that? And where are economics? As usual, it was the hangers-on to life who suffered most. Weavers are useful people, and the village weaver with his wooden hand-loom can hardly be called a hanger-on in a land where every man and woman wears several yards of woven cotton, and washes the garment at least once a day. But how can a weaver live unless women buy his stuff? And how can a woman buy his stuff when she has just sold her doorposts and the family brass dish to buy food for her children, or to pay the police tax for the protection of property? She makes her old rags do, and the weaver starves. There were starving weavers in all the villages, and some it seemed impossible to save even with the food represented by a gift of twopence.