Meanwhile the hunger mortality in Hamadan was increasing. Bread, the chief, indeed the only, article of diet of the poor, was at 14 krans a batman (roughly, the equivalent of ten shillings for 7 lbs.), and the wheat combine saw to it that the price increased rather than decreased. On May 6th Mr. McDouell, the British Consul, officially computed that the daily deaths from starvation were two hundred. Hamadan was a city of horrors. The unburied victims of famine--men, women, and children--were lying in the streets and in the fields adjoining British Headquarters. The Kashish or priest of the Shi'ite mosque, who received a fee of about twopence for officiating at the funerals of those buried in _forma pauperis_, admitted that the daily interment-roll was {118} one hundred and sixty during the first fortnight of May. The hunger-enfeebled survivors became herbivorous, eating the grass in the fields like so many animals. A short course of this diet proved as fatal as the want of bread, for it invariably caused peritonitis and a lingering, agonizing death. But there was worse to come. The foodless people, driven crazy by their sufferings, now resorted to eating human flesh. Cannibalism was a crime hitherto unknown in Persia, and no punishment exists for it under Persian law. The offenders were chiefly women, and the victims children stolen from the doorsteps of their homes, or snatched up haphazard in the bazaar purlieus. Mothers of young children were afraid to leave them while they went to beg for bread, lest in their absence they should be kidnapped and eaten. I never went into the Bazaar or through the narrow, ill-paved streets without a feeling of sickly horror at the sight of the human misery revealed there. Children who were little better than human skeletons would crowd round to beg for bread or the wherewithal to purchase it, and in parting with a few coppers to them, one could not help shuddering and wondering if they, too, were destined, sooner or later, to find their way into the cooking-pot. The Persian Governor one day awoke from his habitual lethargy and roused the local police, who set out on the track of the child-eaters. A series of domiciliary visits brought to light fragments of human bones and rags of clothing. They arrested {119} eight women, who confessed that they had kidnapped, killed, and eaten a number of children, pleading that hunger had driven them to these terrible crimes. On the following day, May 8th, a yet more horrifying case of cannibalism was discovered. Two women, mother and daughter, were caught red-handed. They had killed the daughter's eight-year-old child, and were cooking the body, when the police interrupted the preparations for this horrible feast. The half-cooked remains were removed in a basket, and an indignant crowd of well-fed Democrats followed the wretched offenders to the police-station, threatening them with death.