At a corner where the broad main channel of electric light ended, and
perplexity began, a policeman stood, and directed me into chaos.
"Anywhere," he explained, "anywhere down there will do." I saw a
narrow alley in the darkness, which had one gas lamp and many cobbled
stones. At the bottom of the lane were three iron posts. Beyond the
posts a bracket lamp showed a brick wall, and in the wall was an arch
so full of gloom that it seemed impassable, except to a steady draught
of cold air that might have been the midnight itself entering Limehouse
from its own place. At the far end of that opening in the wall was
nothing. I stood on an invisible wooden platform and looked into
nothing with no belief that a voyage could begin from there. Before me
then should have been the Thames, at the top of the flood tide. It was
not seen. There was only a black void dividing some clusters of
brilliant but remote and diminished lights. There were odd stars which
detached themselves from the fixed clusters, and moved in the void,
sounding the profundity of the chasm beneath them with lines of
trembling fire. Such a wandering comet drifted near where I stood on
the verge of nothing, and then it was plain that its trail of quivering
light did not sound, but floated and undulated on a travelling
road--that chasm before me was black because it was filled with fluid
night. Night, I discovered suddenly, was in irresistible movement. It
was swift and heavy. It was unconfined. It was welling higher to
douse our feeble glims and to founder London, built of shadows on its
boundary. It moved with frightful quietness. It seemed confident of
its power. It swirled and eddied by the piles of the wharf, and there
it found a voice, though that was muffled; yet now and then it broke
into levity for a moment, as at some shrouded and alien jest.

There were sounds which reached me at last from the opposite shore,
faint with distance and terror. The warning from an unseen steamer
going out was as if a soul, crossing this Styx, now knew all. There is
no London on the Thames, after sundown. Most of us know very little of
the River by day. It might then be no more native to our capital than
the Orientals who stand under the Limehouse gas lamps at night. It
surprises us. We turn and look at it from our seat in a tram, and
watch a barge going down on the ebb--it luckily misses the piers of
Blackfriars Bridge--as if a door had unexpectedly