CHAPTER XV

Summary

LOUD thunder had been heard during the night, and never-ceasing flashes of lightning had glared over the room, without disturbing me; neither did the suspected ones in the hall of innocence and peace maraudingly drive us from our rest; but the rain, whisking and dropping with weary beat, was more effectual about five or six o'clock next morning, when all objects beyond the paper window looked cast down and carried a tearful expression about them, as they lay bathing and floating in the wet under an angry sky. A nice prospect, certainly!

The doors were released from their bolts, and a glance out at the long public room told nothing but that everybody had left long ago — even our vitiated opium-eater had rallied from his lethargic inebriation, and was off. The place where they had been, which looked so dramatic last night, was all but unrecognisable. It was as different as seeing the pit of a theatre when lighted up and crowded with a moving noisy audience, and viewing it again empty, dismal, and cold, in the starved daylight. There were the posts, the benches, the stools, and the wooden pillows; but all naked, bare, and dirty, with the black spider and scorpion-haunted beams above them, surrounded by mud-plastered walls, earthy, and not improved by some immoral illustrations — fit accompaniments to gambling and opium-smoking. The jailish-looking windows levied a heavy tax on the light as it struggled to force its way through the blackened sheets of paper, and scarcely reached the unsightly hillocks on the unswept earthen floor.