formed a narrow aqueduct that wavered down a lane of mire. A few
grotesque wretches, thatched about with bamboo matting, like bottles, or
like rosebushes in winter, trotted past shouldering twin baskets. The
smell of joss-sticks, fish, and sour betel, the subtle sweetness of
opium, grew constantly stronger, blended with exhalations of ancient
refuse, and (as the chairs jogged past the club, past filthy groups
huddling about the well in a marketplace, and onward into the black yawn
of the city gate) assailed the throat like a bad and lasting taste. Now,
in the dusky street, pent narrowly by wet stone walls, night seemed to
fall, while fresh waves of pungent odor overwhelmed and steeped the
senses. Rudolph's chair jostled through hundreds and hundreds of
Chinese, all alike in the darkness, who shuffled along before with
switching queues, or flattened against the wall to stare, almost nose
to nose, at the passing foreigner. With chairpoles backing into one shop
or running ahead into another, with raucous cries from the coolies, he
swung round countless corners, bewildered in a dark, leprous, nightmare
bazaar. Overhead, a slit of cloudy sky showed rarely; for the most part,
he swayed along indoors, beneath a dingy lattice roof. All points of the
compass vanished; all streets remained alike,--the same endless vista of
mystic characters, red, black, and gold, on narrow suspended tablets,
under which flowed the same current of pig-tailed men in blue and dirty
white. From every shop, the same yellow faces stared at him, the same
elfin children caught his eye for a half-second to grin or grimace, the
same shaven foreheads bent over microscopical tasks in the dark. At
first, Rudolph thought the city loud and brawling; but resolving this
impression to the hideous shouts of his coolies parting the crowd, he
detected, below or through their noise, from all the long
cross-corridors a wide and appalling silence. Gradually, too, small
sounds relieved this: the hammering of brass-work, the steady rattle of
a loom, or the sing-song call and mellow bell of some burdened hawker,