then should have been the Thames, at the top of the flood tide. It was
not seen. There was only a black void dividing some clusters of
brilliant but remote and diminished lights. There were odd stars which
detached themselves from the fixed clusters, and moved in the void,
sounding the profundity of the chasm beneath them with lines of
trembling fire. Such a wandering comet drifted near where I stood on
the verge of nothing, and then it was plain that its trail of quivering
light did not sound, but floated and undulated on a travelling
road--that chasm before me was black because it was filled with fluid
night. Night, I discovered suddenly, was in irresistible movement. It
was swift and heavy. It was unconfined. It was welling higher to
douse our feeble glims and to founder London, built of shadows on its
boundary. It moved with frightful quietness. It seemed confident of
its power. It swirled and eddied by the piles of the wharf, and there
it found a voice, though that was muffled; yet now and then it broke
into levity for a moment, as at some shrouded and alien jest.

There were sounds which reached me at last from the opposite shore,
faint with distance and terror. The warning from an unseen steamer
going out was as if a soul, crossing this Styx, now knew all. There is
no London on the Thames, after sundown. Most of us know very little of
the River by day. It might then be no more native to our capital than
the Orientals who stand under the Limehouse gas lamps at night. It
surprises us. We turn and look at it from our seat in a tram, and
watch a barge going down on the ebb--it luckily misses the piers of
Blackfriars Bridge--as if a door had unexpectedly opened on a mystery,
revealing another world in London, and another sort of life than ours.
It is as uncanny as if we had sensed another dimension of space. The
tram gets among the buildings again, and we are reassured by the
confined and arid life we know. But what a light and width had that