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