brass-work, the steady rattle of
a loom, or the sing-song call and mellow bell of some burdened hawker,
bumping past, his swinging baskets filled with a pennyworth of trifles.
But still the silence daunted Rudolph in this astounding vision, this
masque of unreal life, of lost daylight, of annihilated direction, of
placid turmoil and multifarious identity, made credible only by the
permanence of nauseous smells.

Somewhere in the dark maze, the chairs halted, under a portal black and
heavy as a Gate of Dreams. And as by the anachronism of dreams
there hung, among its tortuous symbols, the small, familiar
placard--"Fliegelman and Sons, Office." Heywood led the way, past two
ducking Chinese clerks, into a sombre room, stone-floored, furnished
stiffly with a row of carved chairs against the wall, lighted coldly by
roof-windows of placuna, and a lamp smoking before some commercial god
in his ebony and tinsel shrine.

"There," he said, bringing Rudolph to an inner chamber, or dark little
pent-house, where another draughty lamp flickered on a European desk.
"Here's your cell. I'm off--call for you later. Good luck!"--Wheeling in
the doorway, he tossed a book, negligently.--"Caught! You may as well
start in, eh?--'Cantonese Made Worse,'"

To his departing steps Rudolph listened as a prisoner, condemned, might
listen to the last of all earthly visitors. Peering through a kind of
butler's window, he saw beyond the shrine his two pallid subordinates,
like mystic automatons, nodding and smoking by the doorway. Beyond
them, across a darker square like a cavern-mouth, flitted the living
phantoms of the street. It seemed a fit setting for his fears. "I am
lost," he thought; lost among goblins, marooned in the age of barbarism,
shut in a labyrinth with a Black Death at once actual and mediaeval: he
dared not think of Home, but flung his arms on the littered desk, and
buried his face.

On the tin pent-roof, the rain trampled inexorably.

At last, mustering a shaky resolution, he set to work ransacking the
tumbled papers. Happily, Zimmerman had left all in confusion. The very
hopelessness of his accounts proved a relief. Working at high tension,
Rudolph wrestled through disorder, mistakes, falsification; and little
by little, as the sorted piles grew and his pen traveled faster, the old
absorbing love of method and dispatch--the stay, the cordial flagon of
troubled man--gave him strength to forget.

At times, felt shoes scuffed th