and not a soul was abroad, and
not a sound broke their stillness. It was a picture of the desolation of
midnight lighted up, but empty and waste as the most profound and solemn
hours before the day. Other of these by-roads, of older settlement, were
furnished with more important houses, standing far back from the
pavement, each in a little wood of greenery, and thus one might look down
as through a forest vista, and see a way smooth and guarded with low
walls and yet untrodden, and all a leafy silence. Here and there in some
of these echoing roads a figure seemed laxily advancing in the distance,
hesitating and delaying, as if lost in the labyrinth. It was difficult to
say which were the more dismal, these deserted streets that wandered away
to right and left, or the great main thoroughfare with its narcotic and
shadowy life. For the latter appeared vast, interminable, grey, and those
who traveled by it were scarcely real, the bodies of the living, but
rather the uncertain and misty shapes that come and go across the desert
in an Eastern tale, when men look up from the sand and see a caravan pass
them, all in silence, without a cry or a greeting. So they passed and
repassed each other on those pavements, appearing and vanishing, each
intent on his own secret, and wrapped in obscurity. One might have sworn
that not a man saw his neighbor who met him or jostled him, that here
every one was a phantom for the other, though the lines of their paths
crossed and recrossed, and their eyes stared like the eyes of live men.
When two went by together, they mumbled and cast distrustful glances
behind them as though afraid all the world was an enemy, and the
pattering of feet was like the noise of a shower of rain. Curious
appearances and simulations of life gathered at points in the road, for
at intervals the villas ended and shops began in a dismal row, and looked
so hopeless that one wondered who could buy. There were women fluttering
uneasily about the greengrocers, and shabby things in rusty black touched
and retouched the red lumps that an unshaven butcher offered, and already
in the corner public there was a confused noise, with a tossing of voices
that rose and fell like a Jewish chant, with the senseless stir of
marionettes jerked into an imitation of gaiety. Then, in crossing a side
street that seemed like grey mid-winter in stone, he trespassed from one
world to another, for an old decayed house amidst its garden held the