Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/19

. Its narrow acres of brick and stone and asphalt became something unbounded and infinite, as bewildering and wide as the open Atlantic. It seemed to harbour fantastic potentialities. It seemed to release the spirit of romance, as moonlight unfetters a lover s lips.

Yet Lingg, the wireless operator of the Laminian, became more and more alarmed at the opacity of this fog. He felt, as he burrowed mole-like across the mist-blanketed city, that he had been a fool to leave the ship. He should have listened to reason. And now he had missed his way. He was lost in the very heart of that vast and undecipherable wilderness, which had always filled him with a vague fear, even in the open sunlight, where its serrated skyline reminded him of a waiting trap-jaw. He was hopelessly at sea in the silence which surrounded him, overawed by the quietness which the turn of a street-corner might convert into some perilous ambuscade. Heilig, the engineer, had been right. He'd been a fool to come ashore.

He recalled, a little enviously, the figure of the engineer, the morose and lank and slatternly figure in ragged carpet-slippers, leaning against the ship's rail and smoking the long-stemmed German pipe with its blue china bowl. He remembered the engineer's impassive stare and his almost placid grunt of protest as he wheeled