LITMIR.BIZ

      The City of Peril

      CHAPTER I

       Table of Contents

      THE CITY OF PERIL

      The fog groped and felt its way along the water-front. Then it crept up to the throat of the city, like a grey hand, and strangled Broadway into an ominous quietness.

      It tightened its grip, as the day grew older, leaving the cross-streets from Union Square to the Battery clotted with congested traffic. It brought on an untimely protest of blinking street-lamps, as uncannily bewildering as the mid-day cock-crowing of a solar eclipse. It caused the vague and shadowy walls of skyscrapers to blossom into countless yellow window tiers, as close-packed as the scales of a snake. Bells sounded from gloom-wrapt shipping along the saw-tooth line of the river slips, tolling the watches and falling silent and tolling again, as they might have tolled in mid-ocean, or on some lonely waterway that led to the uttermost ends of the earth.

      Now and then, out of the distance, a ​river-ferry or a car-float tug could be heard growl ing and whimpering for room, as it wrangled over its right-of-way. Everything moved slowly through the muffled streets. Carriages crept across the sepulchral quietness with a strange and uncouth reverence, like tourists through a catacomb. Surface cars, crawling funereally forward, felt their way with gong-strokes, as blind men feel their way with stick-taps. An occasional taxicab, swinging tentatively out of a side-street, slewed and skidded in the greasy mud. Lonely drivers watched from their seats, watched like sea captains from bridge-ends when ice has invaded their sea lanes.

      Under the gas-lamps, dulled to a reddish yellow, passed a thin scattering of pedestrians. A touch of desolation clung about each figure that groped its way through the short-vistaed street, as though the thoroughfare it trod were a lonely moraine and the figure itself the last man that walked a ruined world. It was the worst fog that New York had known for years; the city lay under it like a mummy swathed in grey.

      Yet the gloom seemed to crown it with a new wonder, to endow it with a new dignity. That all too shallow tongue of land that is lipped by the East and North rivers took on strange and undreamt-of distances. It lay engulfed in twilight mysteries, enriched with unlooked-for ​possibilities. 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

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