REVIEW
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flat land remaining they moved up to the hillsides and colonized the ravines and slopes which were too steep for normal development. The huts were constructed of such material as they could lay hands on at little or no cost- flattened sheets of tin, wooden boarding, cardboard, sacking slung on frames-every variety of two dimensional material that was light enough to carry and cheap enough to beg or steal or buy for a few dollars. Land was scarce even for the squatters and the huts were packed like dense honeycombs or irregular warrens at different levels, with little ventilation or light and no regular access. The shacks themselves were crowded beyond endurance. In some cases five or six human beings existed in a cubicle measuring 40 square feet. Density was at a rate of 2,000 persons to an acre in single storey huts. There was, of course, no sanitation and there was seldom any organized system of refuse disposal. There was in most cases no mains water immediately available, and water for all purposes had to be carried long distances from communal standpipes or collected from such hillside streams as the season allowed. Cooking fuel was charcoal or wood used in open 'chatties' (small cooking stoves) and at night some of the huts were lit with kerosene lamps or candles. Chickens, ducks and pigs shared the huts or the narrow congested areas around them. Sacking curtains over the doors gave privacy and they provided a measure of warmth in winter and of protection from torrential rains in the summer. Some of the squatters had work in the towns; others started cottage industries, which were sometimes more akin to small primitive factories, in the settlements, either in their own huts or in similar structures erected specially for the purpose. Inspection of such premises was impossible and it is probably true to say that each of these enterprises constituted a danger to health or to life and limb in one form or another. In such conditions every kind of vice flourished. Drugs were manu- factured, sold and stored; there were divans, brothels and gambling houses; every form of crime was sheltered by the anonymity of these dark places.