lights that flared and faded behind the crusted window-glass or fell
through opened floor-traps to the thick black element that swirled about
the spiles, and from guarded calls as well, inarticulate cries of hate and
love and pain, rumours of close and crude carousal.

And ever and again the belated riverfarer would encounter one of the
wherries, its long oars swung by brawny arms and backs, stealing secretly
across the inky waters on some errand no less dark.

On land the buildings lined a cobbled street, from dawn to dark a
thoroughfare for thundering lorries and, twice daily, in murk of early
morning and gloom of early night, scoured by a nondescript rabble employed
in the vast dockyards whose man-made forests of masts and cordage, funnels
and cranes, on either hand lifted angular black silhouettes against the
misty silver of the sky.

Black and white and yellow and brown, men of every race and skin, they came
and went, their brief hours loud with babel of strange tongues and a
scuffling of countless feet like the sound of surf; and their goings left
the street strangely hushed, a way of sinister reticences, its winding
length ill-lighted by infrequent corner-lamps, its mephitic glooms
enlivened by windows of public houses all saffron with specious promise of
purchasable good-fellowship.

One of these, the Red Moon, faced the row of waterfront houses, standing at
the intersection of a street which struck inland to the pulsing heart of
Limehouse. A retired bully of the prize-ring ruled with a high hand over
its several bars and many patrons, yellow men and white girls, deck-hands
and dock-workers, pugilistic and criminal celebrities of the quarter, and
their sycophants. Its revels rendered the nights cacophonous, its portals