During the hot season of 1863, "Nanny Po", as the civilized African calls this "lofty and beautiful island", had become a charnel-house, a "dark and dismal tomb of Europeans". The yellow fever of the last year, which wiped out in two months one-third of the white colony—more exactly, 78 out of 250—had not reappeared, but the conditions for its re-appearance were highly favourable. The earth was all water, the vegetation all slime, the air half steam, and the difference between wet and dry bulbs almost nil.