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Chang, leaving the Bergues hotel at midnight, had taken a walk through the Saint Gervais quarter, and been led by the smell of opium to investigate a mysterious opium den whose floor had failed beneath his feet and dropped him into an underground passage, along which he had been conducted to an exit close to the Seujet Wharf, hustled into a covered boat, and carried up the lake.
Then Henry turned back, and tramped drowsily down the dusty road beneath the moonless sky, and down through the steep, sleeping city, and across the Pont des Bergues, and so to the Quai du Seujet and the Allée Petit Chat, which lay dense and black and warm in shadow, and was full of miawling cats, strange sounds, and queer acrid smells. The drainage system of the St. Gervais quarter was crude.
It lets you down into a passage just like this, that runs down to the water and comes out in the courtyard of one of those tumble-down old pigeon-cotes by the Quai du Seujet. We came out there, and then tried over this side, through a trap by the Molard jetty I'd noticed before, and it led us here. There are dozens of these trappons on both sides. Lots of them are inside houses.
The launch dashed up to the Quai du Seujet, and Henry presented a franc to the pilot, and stepped off, trying to emulate this gentleman's air of never having visited such a low wharf before. "You have brought me rather too far," he said. "But I will walk back." But, now he came to think of it, Dr. Franchi's man must obviously know where he lived, so camouflage was unavailing.
The stairway, smelling of fish and worse, opened out on to a narrow cobbled alley that ran between lofty mediæval houses down from the Rue du Temple to the Quai du Seujet, in the ancient wharfside quarter of Saint Gervais. Henry, pale and melancholy, his soft hat slouched over his face, looked what he was, a badly paid newspaper correspondent lodging in unclean rooms.
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