The Loom of the Desert

by Idah Meacham Strobridge

We had begun at the Joss Houses—gaudy with tinsel, and close and choking from the incense of burning tapers. We had gone to restaurant and theater. At the one, going in through the back way and on through their cooking rooms where they were preparing strange and repulsive looking food; at the other, using the stage entrance and going on the stage with the players. Into opium joints our guide led the way, where the smokers in their utter degradation lay like the dead, as the drug carried the dreamers into a land of untranslatable dreams. We had looked at the pelf in the pawn-shops, and at the painted faces of Chinese courtesans looking out through their lattices.

Then underground we had gone down (three stories) and had seen places and beings hideous in their loathesomeness; loathesome beyond description. To the “Dog Kennel.” Up to earth’s surface again; to “The Rag Picker’s Paradise.” Through “Cum Cook Alley”—through “Ross Alley,” where within a few feet, within a few years, murder after murder had been committed, and (the murderers escaping through the network of secret passageways and hidden doors) the deaths had gone unavenged. Through the haunts of highbinders, and thugs and assassins we moved; and once I passed a little child—a half-caste—toddling through the alley that was reeking with filth. “Look out, Baby!” I said, as he stumbled and fell. “Look out, Man!” he answered in English, and laughed.

“Again the sirocco passed.”—Page [79]

Then, somewhere between high walls that reached to the open air, I found myself alone—left behind by the others. I could see the guide’s light burning—a tiny red spark—far ahead in the darkness, but my own candle had gone out. Away up in the narrow slit showing the sky, shone the cold, still stars. Under my feet crunched clinkers and cinders wet with a little stream from some sewer running over the ground.

Then in the dark wall a door opened, and as the light from within lit up the inky blackness without I saw him again. Again the sirocco passed, burning—scorching the life-blood in my veins.

They came back and found me lying in the wet of the noisome alley. For weeks, in the hotel, I lay ill; then, as soon as I was able to walk unassisted, I took passage for Japan, intending to extend my trip to Suez, and through Europe, on home. I said to myself that I would never again set foot in San Francisco. I feared that horrible something, the power of which seemed stronger over me there than elsewhere. Six times we had met and passed. I shrank from the seventh. Each time that we had come face to face—met—passed—drifted apart, I heard a voice saying that my life was being daily drawn closer and closer into his, to be a part of the warp and woof of his own. And the end? It would be——when? Where? In what way? What would be that final meeting of ours? How far off was it? What would that fatal seventh meeting mean for us both?

I fled from the city as one does from the touch of a leper. I dared not stay.

But the third day out on the ocean there suddenly came over me a knowledge that a greater force than my own will would compel me to return. Something bade me go back. I fought with it; I battled with the dread influence the rest of the voyage. It was useless. I was a passenger on the ship when it returned to San Francisco. There I found the whole city talking and horrified, over a murder hideous, foul, revolting. Carmen de la Guerra, a young Spanish woman, had been brutally murdered—butchered by her lover. I was sick—chilled, when I heard. A foreboding of the truth came to me as I listened. I feverishly read the papers; they told of the tragedy in all its frightful details. I went to the public libraries for the back files. Then I went to the jail to look at the face of the fiend who had killed her. I knew whom I should see behind the bars. It was he. And it was the seventh meeting.

His eyes bade me go and get him release.