acre of flat roofs, and one of the gloomy alleys beside him must
surely debouch upon the sea-front. He elected to try one, anyhow, and
accordingly turned aside into the next.

With ten paces he entered such a darkness as he had never known. The
alley was barely ten feet wide: it lay like a crevasse between high,
windowless walls of houses. The warm, leisurely rain dropped
perpendicularly upon him from an invisible sky, and presently,
hugging the wall, he butted against a corner, and found, or guessed,
that his way was no longer straight. Underfoot there was mud and
garbage that once gulfed him to the knee, and nowhere in all those
terrible, silent walls on each side of him was there a light or a
door, nor any sight of life near at hand. He might have been in a
catacomb, companioned by the dead.

The stillness and the loneliness scared and disturbed him. He turned
on a sudden impulse to make his way back to the lights of the street.

But this was to reckon without the map of Mozambique--which does not
exist. Ten minutes sufficed to overwhelm him in an intricacy of blind
ways. He groped by a wall to a turning, fared cautiously to pass it,
found a blank wall opposite him, and was lost. His sense of direction
left him, and he had no longer any idea of where the street lay and
where the sea. He floundered in gross darkness, inept and
persistent. It took some time, many turnings, and a tumble in the mud
to convince him that he was lost. And then the rain came down in
earnest.

It roared, it pelted, it stamped on him. It was not rain, as he knew
it: it was a cascade, a vehement and malignant assault by all the