And the fine drizzling rain fell upon all alike, pattering upon the
hood of the taxi-cab, trickling down the front windows; glistening
upon the unctuous hair of those in the street who were hatless; dewing
the bare arms of the auctioneers, and dripping, melancholy, from the
tarpaulin coverings of the stalls. Heedless of the rain above and of
the mud beneath, North, South, East, and West mingled their cries,
their bids, their blandishments, their raillery, mingled their persons
in that joyless throng.

Sometimes a yellow face showed close to one of the streaming windows;
sometimes a black-eyed, pallid face, but never a face wholly sane and
healthy. This was an underworld where squalor and vice went hand in
hand through the beautiless streets, a melting-pot of the world's
outcasts; this was the shadowland, which last night had swallowed up
Nayland Smith.

Ceaselessly I peered to right and left, searching amid that rain-
soaked company for any face known to me. Whom I expected to find
there, I know not, but I should have counted it no matter for surprise
had I detected amid that ungracious ugliness the beautiful face of
Karamaneh the Eastern slave-girl, the leering yellow face of a Burmese
dacoit, the gaunt, bronzed features of Nayland Smith; a hundred times
I almost believed that I had seen the ruddy countenance of Inspector
Weymouth, and once (at which instant my heart seemed to stand still) I
suffered from the singular delusion that the oblique green eyes of Dr.
Fu-Manchu peered out from the shadows between two stalls.

It was mere phantasy, of course, the sick imaginings of a mind
overwrought. I had not slept and had scarcely tasted food for more
than thirty hours; for, following up a faint clue supplied by Burke,