chy black, and the lights are so confusing."

"You'll be more confused in ten minutes. You'll have lost your way as
you never lost it before. You're going to go round Bow Bazar section."

"And the Lord have mercy on my soul!" Calcutta, the darker portion of
it, does not look an inviting place to dive into at night.

CHAPTER VI

THE CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT.

"And since they cannot spend or use aright
The little time here given them in trust,
But lavish it in weary undelight
Of foolish toil, and trouble, strife and lust--
They naturally clamour to inherit
The Everlasting Future--that their merit
May have full scope.... As surely is most just."

--_The City of Dreadful Night._

The difficulty is to prevent this account from growing steadily
unwholesome. But one cannot rake through a big city without encountering
muck.

The Police kept their word. In five short minutes, as they had
prophesied, their charge was lost as he had never been lost before.
"Where are we now?" "Somewhere off the Chitpore Road, but you wouldn't
understand if you were told. Follow now, and step pretty much where we
step--there's a good deal of filth hereabouts."

The thick, greasy night shuts in everything. We have gone beyond the
ancestral houses of the Ghoses of the Boses, beyond the lamps, the
smells, and the crowd of Chitpore Road, and have come to a great
wilderness of packed houses--just such mysterious, conspiring tenements
as Dickens would have loved. There is no breeze here, and the air is
perceptibly warmer. If Calcutta keeps such luxuries as Commissioners of
Sewers and Paving, they die before they reach this place. The air is
heavy with a faint, sour stench--the essence of long-neglected
abominations--and it cannot escape from among the tall, three-storied
houses. "This, my dear Sir, is a _perfectly_ respectable quarter as
quarters go. That house at the head of the alley, with the elaborate
stucco-work round the top of the door, was built long ago by a
celebrated midwife. Great people used to live here once. Now it's
the--Aha! Look out for that carriage." A big mail-phaeton crashes out of
the darkness and, recklessly driven, disappears. The wonder is how it
ever got into this maze of narrow streets, where nobody seems to be
moving, and where the dull throbbing of the city's life only comes
faintly and by snatches. "Now it's the what?" "The St. John's Wood of
Calcutta--for the rich Ba