Arrowsmith

From Yunnan in China, from the clattering bright bazaars, crept something invisible in the sun and vigilant by dark, creeping, sinister, ceaseless; creeping across the Himalayas, down through walled market-places, across a desert, along hot yellow rivers, into an American missionary compound-creeping, silent, sure; and here and there on its way a man was black and stilled with plague.

In Bombay a new dock-guard, unaware of things, spoke boisterously over his family rice of a strange new custom of the rats.