That was the picture, just as I got it from incendiary books of travel.  It was a poor, miserable imposture.  The reality is no more like it than the Five Points are like the Garden of Eden.  They received me in a great court, paved with marble slabs; around it were broad galleries, one above another, carpeted with seedy matting, railed with unpainted balustrades, and furnished with huge rickety chairs, cushioned with rusty old mattresses, indented with impressions left by the forms of nine successive generations of men who had reposed upon them.  The place was vast, naked, dreary; its court a barn, its galleries stalls for human horses.  The cadaverous, half nude varlets that served in the establishment had nothing of poetry in their appearance, nothing of romance, nothing of Oriental splendor.  They shed no entrancing odors —­just the contrary.  Their hungry eyes and their lank forms continually suggested one glaring, unsentimental fact—­they wanted what they term in California “a square meal.”

I went into one of the racks and undressed.  An unclean starveling wrapped a gaudy table-cloth about his loins, and hung a white rag over my shoulders.  If I had had a tub then, it would have come natural to me to take in washing.  I was then conducted down stairs into the wet, slippery court, and the first things that attracted my attention were my heels.  My fall excited no comment.  They expected it, no doubt.  It belonged in the list of softening, sensuous influences peculiar to this home of Eastern luxury.  It was softening enough, certainly, but its application was not happy.  They now gave me a pair of wooden clogs—­benches in miniature, with leather straps over them to confine my feet (which they would have done, only I do not wear No. 13s.) These things dangled uncomfortably by the straps when I lifted up my feet, and came down in awkward and unexpected places when I put them on the floor again, and sometimes turned sideways and wrenched my ankles out of joint.  However, it was all Oriental luxury, and I did what I could to enjoy it.

They put me in another part of the barn and laid me on a stuffy sort of pallet, which was not made of cloth of gold, or Persian shawls, but was merely the unpretending sort of thing I have seen in the negro quarters of Arkansas.  There was nothing whatever in this dim marble prison but five more of these biers.  It was a very solemn place.  I expected that the spiced odors of Araby were going to steal over my senses now, but they did not.  A copper-colored skeleton, with a rag around him, brought me a glass decanter of water, with a lighted tobacco pipe in the top of it, and a pliant stem a yard long, with a brass mouth-piece to it.