As the enchantment of distance faded and Ma-cha Töng revealed itself in plain prose, fading from purple into sober gray, the ideal of a romantic halt by the pure sea vanished. A long, crooked, tumble-down narrow street, with narrower off-shoots, heaps of fish offal and rubbish, in which swine, mangy, blear-eyed dogs, and children, much afflicted with skin disease, were indiscriminately routing and rolling, pools covered with a thick brown scum, a stream which had degenerated into an open sewer, down which thick green slime flowed tardily, a beach of white sand, the upper part of which was blackened with fish laid out to dry, frames for drying fish everywhere, men, women, children, all as dirty in person and clothing as it was possible to be, thronging the roadway as we approached, air laden with insupportable odors, and the vilest accommodation I ever had in Korea, have fixed this night in my memory. The inn, if inn it was, gave me a room 8 feet by 6, and 5 feet 2 inches high. _Ang-paks_, for it was the family granary, iron shoes of ploughs and spades, bundles of foul rags, seaweed, ears of millet hanging in bunches from the roof, pack saddles, and worse than all else, rotten beans fermenting for soy, and malodorous half-salted fish, just left room for my camp-bed. This den opened on a vile yard, partly dunghill and partly pigpen, in which is the well from which the women of the house, with sublime _sang-froid_, draw the drinking water! Outside is a swamp, which throughout the night gave off sickening odors. Every few minutes something was wanted from my room, and as there was not room for two, I had every time to go out into the yard. Wong’s good-night was, “I hope you won’t die.” When I entered, the mercury was 87°. After that, cooking for man and beast and the _kang_ floor raised it to 107°, at which point it stood till morning, vivifying into revoltingly active life myriads of cockroaches and vermin which revel in heat, not to speak of rats, which ran over my bed, ate my candle, gnawed my straps, and would have left me without boots, had I not long before learned to hang them from the tripod of my camera. From nine years of travelling, some of it very severe and comfortless, that night stands out as hideously memorable.