CHAPTER V.
THE DEMON'S DAUGHTERS.
I found myself in a long straight corridor, walking as it were in a dream by the side of the Demon. He had reduced, for some reason, his abnormal height, and was now no taller than myself. The corridor, or covered street, was high and broad, and it was lit up by hundreds of glaring lamps, whose light dazzled my eyes. It had lanes opening into it, and numbers of ghostly-looking dwellings, with doors like our houses on earth, but without their cheerful and inviting appearance. Some of these were large, aristocratic buildings, residences evidently of great people; others close beside them were poor, insignificant-looking places. The doors of the larger houses were surrounded with lamps of various colours, and fashioned in all manner of fantastic shapes. Crowds of people were sauntering listlessly about, for the most part in a solemn and painful silence—like convicts, I thought, taking exercise in a prison yard. Occasionally a loud burst of bitter, derisive laughter, or a hideous yell of pain, or the shout of combatants in a sudden outbreak of popular passion, disturbed the pervading silence of the place.
Amongst the individuals who paraded this great street, I perceived one like a negro grenadier, who issued orders,
