When he left, Lee made no revelation of what had been said downstairs; Savina accepted the situation as it had been exposed to her. “I can't allow myself to think of a night here,” she told him; “it will be a horror.” She opened the slats of the long window shutters, and glowing bars of white heat fell in a ladder-like order across a blue wall; the segments of sunlight were as sharp and solid as incandescent metal. In the cobalt shadow Savina was robbed of her vitality; she seemed unreal; as she passed through the vivid projected rays of midday it appeared as though they must shine uninterruptedly through her body. Lee considered the advisability of taking her for a walk--there were, he had seen from the train, no roads here for driving--but, recalling the insolent staring and remarks she had met, he was forced to drop that possibility. Weary from the prolonged wakefulness of the night, Savina made an effort to sleep; and, waiting until she was measurably quiet, Lee went out. The heat was blinding, it walled him in, pressed upon him with a feeling of suffocation, as though--between him and the freshness, the salvation, of any air--there were miles of it packed around him like grey cotton. To the left of the hotel, the bare plaza, half hidden in scrubby bushes, there was an extended shed with a number of doors and fragments of fence, heaped rusted tins and uncovered garbage; and, lounging in the openings, the door-frames often empty, the windows without sashes, were women, scantily covered, sounding every note in a scale from black to white. Yet, Lee observed, the whitest were, essentially, black. What amazed, disturbed, him was their indolent blinking indifference, their indecent imperviousness, in the full blaze of day. They were, to Lee, significant, because from them he drew a knowledge of Cobra. He could not, without such assistance, have arrived at the instinctive understanding that interpreted the street into which he turned. It was the street of a delirium, running, perhaps, for half a mile; an irregular deeply rutted way formed by its double row of small unsubstantial buildings of raw or gaudily painted boards and galvanized sheet iron. They were all completely open at the front, with their remarkable contents, pandemoniums of merchandise, exposed upon a precarious sidewalk of uneven parallel boards elevated two or three feet above the road. Mostly cafés, restaurants, there was still an incredible number of banks--mere shells with flat tarred roofs and high counters built from wall to wall. The receivers, the paying tellers, were many, with the mingled bloods, the heterogeneous characteristics, of China and Colonial Spain and Africa; and, back of their activity--there was a constant rush of deposited money and semi-confidential discussion--were safes so ponderous and ancient that they might have contained the treasure of a plate fleet of Peru.