Streams of water led from a higher level up the river run alongside the street through most of the bazars for the use of the inhabitants. The water is good enough where it enters the city, but as it goes on it gathers impurities of all sorts. Refuse and filth from the houses find their way into it, people sit and wash themselves in it, and dead bodies, too, are washed in the same stream without thought of the disease which caused death. By the time the water reaches the Bala Hisar side of the city its quality may be imagined, and yet this is the water the inhabitants have to use for drinking and cooking purposes. In cholera and other epidemics it is in that portion of the city which the water reaches last where the disease rages most, and no doubt it is the washing of the bodies of people dead of the disease in the same water used by others for drinking which accounts for a good deal of the spread and long stay of those epidemics which visit Kabul periodically and carry off so many thousands of its inhabitants. Shortly before Amir Abdur Rahman’s death he instituted a system of latrines in the city with donkeys to carry away the soil, selling the latter to those cultivators who required it. This did much to sweeten the city, but as all private houses could not be included in the scheme because only the larger houses have refuse-shoots built up against the outside wall whence the soil could be carried away, and no strange man may enter a house where women are, there was still a good deal left to be desired. The present Amir, during the cholera epidemic of 1903, had all the streets of the city swept and cleaned daily by an army of sweepers, and this was a step in the right direction, but with the necessity for cleanliness removed orientals soon fall back into their happy-go-lucky habits. With the quantity of refuse thrown out of some thirty thousand houses daily the city of Kabul would soon become impossible to live in, but for the scavenging work done by the dogs and crows, who are the unconscious remedy of the evil, and prevent the city becoming uninhabitable. I was told that one of the former Amirs had all bazar dogs killed, and the occasion was remembered, because soon afterwards a bad epidemic of cholera visited the city. The present Amir also gave orders for all bazar dogs to be killed, and the bulk of them were despatched, and then a few months later the cholera epidemic of 1903 broke out and was noted for its virulence. CHAPTER IV KABUL—_continued_ How streets are governed—City magistrate—Robberies and murders—Bazar shops—Style of palaces and better-class houses—Climate of Kabul.