The city seemed but an endless succession of terraced, water-washed houses under an endless rain. The storm lashed the waves in the harbor into running ridges of foam, and on the billows the ferry-boat (falling and rising, rising and falling) pushed her way through gray skeleton-ships at anchor, and into her slip at the wharf. The drivers of wagons and trucks on the lower deck, wrapped in oilskins yellow or black and all dripping with wet, drove down the echoing planks. Then the people began to descend the stairways. With my right hand steadying me, I had taken three downward steps when the gripping at my heart told me who was passing at my left (always at the left, it had been; at the left, always) and he of the smoldering eyes that burned into mine like live embers passed me quickly, and went on down the stairway and into the rain-wetted crowd. * * * * * And again---- It happened when, with a guide and some Club friends, we went through the Chinatown slums of the city. It was Saturday night; the night of all others for hovels and evil haunts to disgorge their hives of human bees to swarm through passage and alley, or up and down the dark and wretched stairways. We had begun at the Joss Houses--gaudy with tinsel, and close and choking from the incense of burning tapers. We had gone to restaurant and theater. At the one, going in through the back way and on through their cooking rooms where they were preparing strange and repulsive looking food; at the other, using the stage entrance and going on the stage with the players. Into opium joints our guide led the way, where the smokers in their utter degradation lay like the dead, as the drug carried the dreamers into a land of untranslatable dreams. We had looked at the pelf in the pawn-shops, and at the painted faces of Chinese courtesans looking out through their lattices. Then underground we had gone down (three stories) and had seen places and beings hideous in their loathesomeness; loathesome beyond description. To the “Dog Kennel.” Up to earth’s surface again; to “The Rag Picker’s Paradise.” Through “Cum Cook Alley”--through “Ross Alley,” where within a few feet, within a few years, murder after murder had been committed, and (the murderers escaping through the network of secret passageways and hidden doors) the deaths had gone unavenged. Through the haunts of highbinders, and thugs and assassins we moved; and once I passed a little child--a half-caste--toddling through the alley that was reeking with filth. “Look out, Baby!” I said, as he stumbled and fell. “Look out, Man!” he answered in English, and laughed. [Illustration: “Again the sirocco passed.”--Page 79]