When Gypo turned to the left past the lamp he came into a narrow street in which there were no houses. On the right-hand side there was a high wall, like a barrack wall. It enclosed a big goods yard belonging to a manufactory, where mineral waters or something of that kind were made. On the other side of the street there was no wall at all. The foundations of houses still remained. Here and there, a doorway, a chimney stack, or the brick framework of a window, stood up in a ghastly fashion. Beyond that there was an open space full of refuse, mounds of earth, bricks, pots, old clothes. The street itself was a network of puddles. In order to avoid wetting himself to the knees, Gypo had to walk along the sloping bank of clay where the houses had crumbled. It was a dreary sight. It almost shouted its experiences, and if it had shouted, it would have talked in that endless, loud, babbling scream in which maniacs and demented creatures utter their words. It was alive in that peculiar way in which ruins are alive at night, when the earth is covered with darkness and the living sleep. But Gypo was not sensitive. For him, the street, with its dirt and its squalor, was a savage sauce to whet his appetite for the riotous feast of . . . He strode rapidly. He jumped from mound to mound, now slipping with a curse, now catching a loose brick in some piece of wall to steady himself. Now and again he heard a “hist” from the opposite wall of the street, where some woman, old and decrepit, sought the darkness so that her ravaged figure might escape the drunken eyes of some passionate fellow seeking a fool’s pleasure. These noises, croaks uttered by damned souls, sounds so tremendously horrid to the innocent mind, made no impression on Gypo. To him they were merely noises, expressions of everyday life. Once he recognized one of the women who took a pace forward from her position and put a wrinkled hand to her brow to look at him. “Ho! Blast yer sowl, Maggie Casey,” he muttered, “aren’t ye dead yet?” He chuckled with laughter as he heard her blasphemous rejoinder. As he approached the far end of the street the silence lessened. He heard whisperings and murmurs, snatches of distant song, sounds of footfalls, strains of music. These sounds acted on him like battle-cries. He almost broke into a run as he came gradually nearer to the volume of sound. At last he dashed under an old archway and he was in the next street. The medley of sound was all about him. On his left-hand side stretched the long, low streets of brothels, entwined like webwork among the ruins of what was once a resort of the nobility of eighteenth-century Dublin.