lunging on through rain-swept darkness. I never knew
the course nor the place where we left our gharri and took to narrower
ways afoot, but here the nightmare closed in upon us. We breathed an air
heavy with mortality, on pavements made slimy by countless naked feet,
in a shaft, in a pit, between dank walls. Shapes drifted by like sheeted
corpses, peering, floating up, melting away; from pools and eddies of
lamplight sinister faces started out and fingers pointed after us. For
we had come to strange waters, the teeming backwaters of the city.

* * * * *

Port Said has its tide rips if you like, is wickeder perhaps in its
hectic way; you need to keep to soundings in Singapore, and parts of
Macao and Shanghai you do well to navigate with an extra lookout and
pressing business somewhere else. But Calcutta at night is the Sargasso
Sea. There you wander among the other derelicts, helpless, hopeless,
moving always deeper down lost channels, uncharted, fetid, clogged with
infinite suggestions of dim horrors--

To top our bewilderment, the captain and I found ourselves being piloted
swiftly through this welter, without pause or fault, by alleys and
reeking courts, doubling and twisting. We dived into a lurid, crowded
cavern that echoed with some dismal merrymaking of string and drum. We
jostled the loungers in a low-caste drinking shop and pushed on to a
dark stair that rose like the ladder of a dovecote. The place was alive
with twitterings and shufflings. Steps fled before us and half-naked
bodies caromed against us from the void until a last rush landed us on
the floor above the street.

There was a dusky room hung with blue stuffs where dragons black and
gold crawled and ramped. It ran along the front of the house as a
gallery, but it had no windows--only a row of shallow cells, so to say,
divided by the hangings. Down at the far end low lights burned hot and
small under wreaths of greasy incense, and a big, green joss grinned
from a niche. He was fat and crass and ugly, that joss, a fit deity for
such a den, and he seemed to nod and to listen!

Perhaps because we were listening!...

"Whaur's that pipe? Whaur's that pipe? Boy, you smoke wallah, whaur's
that pipe?" A voice to send the chill into your marrow, slab and dreary
and overlaid, but with a rasp that we knew and would have known anywhere
on earth, or under. "_Not_ the silver one, ye blistered limb--"

Nobody came; nothing stirred