a bench or
stool as black as soot can paint it, a few bowls, a few bits of rags, a
few fragments of food, and a coolie squatting over a struggling
fire,--coolie who rises out of the dim smoke like the evil _genii_ in
the Arabian tale. There is no chimney, there is no window, there is no
drainage. We are in a cubic sink, where we can scarcely stand erect.
From the small door pours a dense volume of smoke, some of it stale
smoke, which our entry has forced out of the corners; the kitchen will
only hold so much smoke, and we have made havoc among the cubic inches.
Underfoot, the thin planks sag into standing pools, and there is a
glimmer of poisonous blue just along the base of the blackened walls;
thousands feed daily in troughs like these!

The next apartment, smaller yet, and blacker and bluer, and more
slippery and slimy, is an uncovered cesspool, from which a sickening
stench exales continually. All about it are chambers--very small
ones,--state-rooms let me call them, opening upon narrow galleries that
run in various directions, sometimes bridging one another in a marvelous
and exceedingly ingenious economy of space. The majority of these
state-rooms are just long enough to lie down in, and just broad enough
to allow a narrow door to swing inward between two single beds, with two
sleepers in each bed. The doors are closed and bolted; there is often no
window, and always no ventilation.

Our "special," by the authority vested in him, tries one door and
demands admittance. There is no response from within. A group of
coolies, who live in the vicinity and have followed close upon our heels
even since our descent into the under world, assure us in soothing tones
that the place is vacant. We are suspicious and persist in our
investigation; still no response. The door is then forced by the
"special," and behold four of the "seven sleepers" packed into this
air-tight compartment, and insensible even to the hearty greeting we
offer them!

The air is absolutely overpowering. We hasten from the spot, but are
arrested in our flight by the "special," who leads us to the gate of the
catacombs, and bids us follow him. I know not to what extent the earth
has been riddled under the Chinese Quarter; probably no man knows save
he who has burrowed, like a gopher, from one living grave to another,
fleeing from taxation or the detective. I know that we thread dark
passages, so narrow that two of us may not cross tracks, so low that w