There would be Millwall.  The tug and the turmoil had gone.  We were alone again in the beyond.  There was no sound now but the water spattering under our craft, and the fumbling and infrequent splash of the sweep.  Once we heard the miniature bark of a dog, distinct and fine, as though distance had refined it as well as reduced it.  We were nearly round the loop the River makes about Millwall, and this unknown region before us was Blackwall Reach by day, and Execution Dock used to be dead ahead.  To the east, over the waters, red light exploded fan-wise and pulsed on the clouds latent above, giving them momentary form.  It was as though, from the place where it starts, the dawn had been released too soon, and was at once recalled.  “The gas works,” said the skipper.

Still the slow drift, quite proper to those at large in eternity.  But this, I was told, was the beginning of Bugsby’s Reach.  It was first a premonition, then a doubt, and at last a distinct tremor in the darkness ahead of us.  A light appeared, grew nearer, higher, and brighter, and there was a suspicion of imminent mass.  “Watch her,” warned the skipper.  Watch what?  There was nothing to watch but the dark and some planets far away, one of them red.  The menacing one still grew higher and brighter.  It came at us.  A wall instantly appeared to overhang us, with a funnel and masts above it, and our skipper’s yell was lost in the thunder of a churning propeller.  The air shuddered, and a siren hooted in the heavens.  A long, dark body seemed minutes going by us, and our skipper’s insults were taken in silence by her superior deck.  She left us riotous in her wake, and we continued our journey dancing our indignation on the uneasy deck of the Lizzie.

The silent drift recommenced, and we neared a region of unearthly lights and the smell of sulphur, where aerial skeletons, vast and black, and columns and towers, alternately glowed and vanished as the doors of infernal fires were opened and shut.  We drew abreast of this phantom place where names and darkness battled amid gigantic ruin.  Charon spoke.  “They’re the coal wharves,” he said.

The lights of a steamer rose in the night below the wharves, but it was our own progress which brought them nearer.  She was anchored.  We made out at last her shape, but at first she did not answer our hail.

“Hullo, Aldebaran,” once more roared our captain.

There was no answer.  In a minute we should be by her, and too late.

“Barge ahoy!” came a voice.  “Look out for a line.”

III.  A Shipping Parish