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In each cubicle was a table, covered with oilcloth, at the head of which was placed a red lacquer pillow and a little glass lamp that gave the only light needed in the long, low room. On the tables lay Burmen and Chinamen, some rigid in drugged sleep, and some smoking immense pipes with small, cup-like receptacles that held the opium.
"I am ready to take my oath I saw him cross that narrow street back yonder." "Was it one of our own men do you think?" said Codd, referring to the two Burmen they had brought with them. "Not a bit of it," Hayle replied. "I tell you, Kitwater, I am as sure as I am of anything that the man I saw was a Chinaman." "Gammon," said Kitwater. "There isn't a Chinaman within fifty miles of the ruins.
Poor Burmen in red and yellow cottons, as content with life as their wealthy brethren, loitered and smoked with the little white-coated women with flower-decked heads, and they all flowed on with the tide and filled the air with a perpetual babel of sound. The great, high houses on either side of the street were dilapidated and gaunt, let out for the most part in flats and tenements.
The shadows of evening were slowly falling as the little party of which Kitwater, Codd, and Hayle, with two Burmen servants, were members, obtained their first view of the gigantic ruins of which they had come so far in search. For many days they had been journeying through the jungle, now the prey of hope, now of despair.
Rich Burmen clad in yards of stiff, rustling silk jostled the lean, spare Chinamen and the Madrassis who came to Mangadone to make money out of the indolence of the natives of a place who cared to do little but smoke and laugh.
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