Page:Scented isles and coral gardens- Torres Straits, German New Guinea and the Dutch East Indies, by C.D. Mackellar, 1912.pdf/201

Rh and would not allow the ladies to pay their share. I descended on King Peter for having led us astray.

After lunch—feeling bound, as one always does on a first visit to a great city, to see the tire-some sights-we visited the hospital, which is a moderate—sized building, but clean and airy. It has an open space—a clearing in the tropical jungle—in front of it, adorned with a monument to the Landeshauptmann Curt von Hagen, whose residence it had been, and who was murdered by the natives. There were two fever patients, Germans, both looking melancholy wrecks. The nurse—a very important personage—was a very fair, healthy-looking, handsome German, quite imposing in her starched white attire, a really handsome woman. She, the betel-nut mission-ary's wife, and Frau Wolff were at this time, so far as I could learn, the three German women in this German colony. As she spoke no English, I again had to make all the conversation, and became quite irritated at having to translate to my compatriots. The great Professor Koch lived here for a time, conducting experiments in connection with the coast fever or malaria which decimates these lands. His theory was that the fever microbes were carried about by the mosquitoes, who, when they bit people, left a microbe behind. It is very bad here, and people are sometimes attacked suddenly and are dead in a few hours. This theory of Koch's is now accepted by the scientific world generally, but has some opponents.

The nurse, however, did not at all approve of Professor Koch's theories or treatment, though, of course, one can understand that quinine is of service in a moderate way. I fancy they sometimes overdo it. She told me she had had the fever several times herself, but she looked the