Edwin Lord Weeks was an American artist who traveled extensively in the late nineteenth century. Here’s an odd quote from his diary, The Black Sea Through Persia And India:
Outside Turkomanshai, September 17, 1892: Here, as elsewhere near a village, we are beset with cats—not that we regard them with antipathy, but there really are too many cats. They seem to spring up from the ground, and curl themselves snugly in our beds. When they have been expelled they make a semblance of retreating, but return again to take refuge among our bags and carpets. At the dinner hour they prowl about the door of the tent in anticipation of bones, and pass like illuminated silhouettes across the track of the lantern light.