Mark Twain travels through the dark streets of Bombay after night fall.  The streets are full of sleeping figures stretched out on the ground, wrapped in blankets with barely enough room for the carriage.  He attends a betrothal celebration featuring Nautch dancers and musicians.  This occurs before the plague hits the city but at the time of his writing this chapter the city is decimated with the plague.  Twain includes a passage from "Eothen" by Alexander William Kinglake, imagining the onset of the plague.  He writes "Kinglake was in Cairo many years ago during an epidemic of the Black Death, and he has imagined the terrors that creep into a man's heart at such a time and follow him until they themselves breed the fatal sign in the armpit, and then the delirium with confused images, and home-dreams, and reeling billiard-tables, and then the sudden blank of death:"