So they are; but those ways hold more than the visible shades.  The warehouses of that meandering chasm which is Wapping High Street are like weathered and unequal cliffs.  It is hard to believe sunlight ever falls there.  It could not get down.  It is not easy to believe the River is near.  It seldom shows.  You think at times you hear the distant call of a ship.  But what would that be?  Something in the mind.  It happened long ago.  You, too, are a ghost left by the vanished past.  There is a man above at a high loophole, the topmost cave of a warehouse which you can see has been exposed to commerce and the elements for ages; he pulls in a bale pendulous from the cable of a derrick.  Below him one of the horses of a van tosses its nose-bag.  There is no other movement.  A carman leans against an iron post, and cuts bread and cheese with a clasp-knife.  It was curious to hear that steamer call, but we knew what it was.  It was from a ship that went down, we have lately heard, in the War, and her spectre reminds us, from a voyage which is over, of men we shall see no more.  But the call comes again just where the Stairs, like a shining wedge of day, hold the black warehouses asunder, and give us the light of the River and a release to the outer world.  And there, moving swiftly across the brightness, goes a steamer outward bound.

That was what we wanted to know.  She confirms it, and her signal, to whomever it was made, carries farther than she would guess.  It is understood.  The past for some of us now is our only populous and habitable world, invisible to others, but alive with whispers for us.  Yet the sea still moves daily along the old foreshore, and ships still come and go, and do not, like us, run aground on what now is not there.

II.  A Midnight Voyage

Our voyage was to begin at midnight from near Limehouse Hole.  The hour and the place have been less promising in the beginning of many a strange adventure.  Where the voyage would end could not be said, except that it would be in Bugsby’s Reach, and at some time or other.  It was now ten o’clock, getting towards sailing time, and the way to the foreshore was unlighted and devious.  Yet it was somewhere near.  This area of still and empty night railed off from the glare of the Commercial Road would be Limehouse Church.  It is foolish to suppose you know the Tower Hamlets because you have seen them by day.  They change.  They are like those uncanny folk of the fables.  At night, wonderfully, they become something else, take another form, which has never been more than glimpsed, and another character, so fabulous and secret that it will support the tales of the wildest romanticist, who rightly feels that if such yarns were told of ’Frisco or Timbuctoo they might get found out.  Was this the church?  Three Chinamen were disputing by its gate.  Perhaps they were in disagreement as to where the church would be in daylight.