At first, Rudolph thought the city loud and brawling; but resolving this impression to the hideous shouts of his coolies parting the crowd, he detected, below or through their noise, from all the long cross-corridors a wide and appalling silence.

Gradually, too, small sounds relieved this: the hammering of brass-work, the steady rattle of a loom, or the sing-song call and mellow bell of some burdened hawker, bumping past, his swinging baskets filled with a pennyworth of trifles.
But still the silence daunted Rudolph in this astounding vision, this masque of unreal life, of lost daylight, of annihilated direction, of placid turmoil and multifarious identity, made credible only by the permanence of nauseous smells.
Somewhere in the dark maze, the chairs halted, under a portal black and heavy as a Gate of Dreams.

And as by the anachronism of dreams there hung, among its tortuous symbols, the small, familiar placard--"Fliegelman and Sons, Office." Heywood led the way, past two ducking Chinese clerks, into a sombre room, stone-floored, furnished stiffly with a row of carved chairs against the wall, lighted coldly by roof-windows of placuna, and a lamp smoking before some commercial god in his ebony and tinsel shrine.
"There," he said, bringing Rudolph to an inner chamber, or dark little pent-house, where another draughty lamp flickered on a European desk.
"Here's your cell.

I'm off--call for you later.

Good luck!"-- Wheeling in the doorway, he tossed a book, negligently.--"Caught! You may as well start in, eh?
--'Cantonese Made Worse,'" To his departing steps Rudolph listened as a prisoner, condemned, might listen to the last of all earthly visitors.