In the cities, indeed, conditions are even worse than in the country, the slums of the Orient surpassing the slums of the West. The French publicist Louis Bertrand paints positively nauseating pictures of the poorer quarters of the great Levantine towns like Cairo, Constantinople, and Jerusalem. Omitting his more poignant details, here is his description of a Cairo tenement: "In Cairo, as elsewhere in Egypt, the wretchedness and grossness of the poorer-class dwellings are perhaps even more shocking than in the other Eastern lands. Two or three dark, airless rooms usually open on a hall-way not less obscure. The plaster, peeling off from the ceilings and the worm-eaten laths of the walls, falls constantly to the filthy floors. The straw mats and bedding are infested by innumerable vermin."[275] In India it is the same story. Says Fisher: "Even before the growth of her industries had begun, the cities of India presented a baffling housing problem. Into the welter of crooked streets and unsanitary habits of an Oriental city these great industrial plants are wedging their thousands of employees. Working from before dawn until after dark, men and women are too exhausted to go far from the plant to sleep, if they can help it. When near-by houses are jammed to suffocation, they live and sleep in the streets. In Calcutta, twenty years ago,[276] land had reached $200,000 an acre in the overcrowded tenement districts."[277] Of Calcutta, a Western writer remarks: "Calcutta is a shame even in the East. In its slums, mill hands and dock coolies do not live; they pig. Houses choke with unwholesome breath; drains and compounds fester in filth. Wheels compress decaying refuse in the roads; cows drink from wells soaked with sewage, and the floors of bakeries are washed in the same pollution."[278] In the other industrial centres of India, conditions are practically the same. A Bombay native sanitary official stated in a report on the state of the tenement district, drawn up in 1904: "In such houses--the breeders of germs and bacilli, the centres of disease and poverty, vice, and crime--have people of all kinds, the diseased, the dissolute, the drunken, the improvident, been indiscriminately herded and tightly packed in vast hordes to dwell in close association with each other."[279]