Page:Works of Jules Verne - Parke - Vol 7.djvu/260

 laughter. "I knew very well that you could not separate yourself from us. Come and engage your berth, come!"

And both entered the ticket office and engaged cabins for four persons. But the clerk told them that the repairs of the Carnatic being completed, the steamer would leave at eight o'clock in the evening, and not the next morning, as had been announced.

"Very good!" replied Passepartout, "that will suit my master. I am going to inform him."

At this moment Fix took an extreme step. He determined to tell Passepartout everything. It was the only means, perhaps, that he had of retaining Phileas Fogg for a few days in Hong Kong.

Leaving the office, Fix offered to treat his companion in a tavern. Passepartout had the time. He accepted Fix's invitation.

A tavern opened on the quay. It had an inviting appearance. Both entered. It was a large room, finely decorated, at the back of which was stretched a camp bed, furnished with cushions. Upon this bed were lying a certain number of sleepers.

Some thirty customers in the large room occupied small tables of plaited rushes. Some emptied pints of English beer, ale or porter, others jugs of alcoholic liquors, gin, or brandy. Besides, the most of them were smoking long, red-clay pipes, stuffed with little balls of opium mixed with essence of rose. Then, from time to time, some smoker overcome would fall down under the table, and the waiters of the establishment, taking him by the head and feet, carried him onto the camp-bed, alongside of another. Twenty of these sots were thus laid side by side, in the last stage of brutishness.

Fix and Passepartout understood that they had entered a smoking-house haunted by those wretched, stupefied, lean, idiotic creatures, to whom mercantile England sells annually ten million four hundred thousand pounds' worth of the fatal drug called opium. Sad millions are these, levied on one of the most destructive vices of human nature.

The Chinese Government has tried hard to remedy such an abuse by severe laws, but in vain. From the rich class, to whom the use of opium was at first formally reserved, it has descended to the lower classes, and its ravages can no