When the sun sank in the waves of the Pacific on the sixth of May, every Japanese had his orders for the next few hours, and the five thousand men whose part it was to attend to the work to be accomplished in San Francisco on the morning of the seventh, disappeared silently into the subterranean caves and cellars of the Chinese quarter, to fetch their weapons and be ready for action soon after midnight. _Chapter VIII_ IN THE BOWELS OF THE EARTH It was thought that the earthquake had done away forever with the underground labyrinth of the Chinese quarter--those thousands of pens inhabited by creatures that shunned the light of day, those mole-holes which served as headquarters for a subterranean agitation, the mysterious methods of which have never been revealed to the eye of the white man. When had the old Chinatown been laid out; when had those hidden warehouses, those opium dens and hiding-places of the Mongolian proletariat been erected, those dens in which all manner of criminals celebrated their indescribable orgies and which silently hid all these evil-doers from the far-reaching arm of the police? When had the new Chinatown sprung up? When had the new quarter been provided with an endless network of subterranean passages, so that soon all was just as it had been before the earthquake? No one had paid any attention to these things. The Mongolian secret societies never paused for a moment in their invisible conspiracy against the ruling whites, and succeeded in creating a new underground world, over which the street traffic rolled on obliviously. A narrow cellar entrance and greasy, slippery steps led into Hung Wapu's store, behind which there was a chop-house, which in turn led into an opium-den. The rooms behind the latter, from which daylight was forever excluded, were reserved for still worse things. No policeman would ever have succeeded in raiding these dens of iniquity; he would have found nothing but empty rooms or bunks filled with snoring Chinese; the abominable stench would soon have driven him out again, but if, by any chance, he had attempted to penetrate further and to explore the walls for the purpose of discovering hidden openings, the only result would have been a story in the next day's papers about a "missing" policeman. Hung Wapu, whose plump face, with its enormous spectacles, resembled that of an old fat boarding-house keeper, was standing at the entrance to his cellar-shop late on the evening of May sixth. A disgusting odor and the murmur of many voices reached the street from the cellar. The policeman had just made his rounds, and Hung Wapu looked after him with a cunning grin as his heavy steps died away in the distance.