Licence: In copyright
Credit: Plague in India / by Charles Creighton. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.
12/34 (page 316)
![creek of the sea in which it ends. Everything is built of stone. There is an extensive ghat of dressed stone with steps down to a pool of the river. Facing the ghat is the Adllage bazaar, the roadway paved with stone, the houses of one, two, or three stories with stone walls and tiled roofs, raised some 4 or 5 feet above the road on plinths of dressed stone, and sometimes Avith stone steps below the plinths; the houses of the bazaar in a continuous row with doors close to- gether, but the rest of the Aullage more dispersed along the main road and side roads, at one point forming a hamlet, while another part of the village is in scattered houses across the river. The ground-floor rooms are as dark as they usually are in India, with a fire burning on the floor at the far end. The cattle are usually in the house, or in a veranda, but sometimes in a shed of the small compound. So far as concerned the want of light and. air, and the keeping of a mile or more along one or both sides of a stream, some villages hav- ing only one long paved street with a row of houses on either side, like many of our own villages. This peculiarity of the Konkan vil- lages can be seen everywhere upon the large scale maps of the Kolaba and Ratnagiri districts (fig. 2). On the scale of 1 inch to the mile it is possible to show the extent of the village site more accurately than by the conventional dot or small circle or ordinary maps. This lantern slide shows a bit of Ratnagiri district around the head of one of the numerous creeks which run up 20 miles from the sea. It Avill be observed that the small squares, or rhombs, or other geometrical figures, by which cartographers indicate home- steads or clusters of houses, are peppered all over the surface, so that the houses of one village along a stream almost join on to those of cattle indoors, these Konkan village houses did not seem to be worse or better than elsewhere. Their masonry construction, their high plinths and paved roadways Avere proper to a region Avhere stone is easily got and Avhere the heaA^y monsoon rains—100 inches average in the year — make durable .structure necessary. T h e other distinctive character of the Konkan villages is the more o])en order of their Fio. 2.—AMllafrc.s of Riitiuigiri. houses and small home- steads, Avhich may extend](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22406967_0014.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
