Show CHINATOWN A MASS OF RUINS Famous Section of San Francisco Fall i Prey to Flame i r San Francisco Strange Is tho scena where San Franciscos Chinatown stood No heap of smoking ruins marks tho site of the wooden warrens war-rens where slanteyed men of the I Orient dwelt In thousands The place Is pitted with deep holes and seared with dark passageways from whose 1 depths como smoke wreaths All the wood has gone and tho winds are streaking tho ashes j White men never know the depth oj Chinatowns underground city They J talked of these subterranean runways and many of them had gone beneath tho street levels two or three stories But now that Chinatown has been unmasked un-masked for tho destroyed buildings were only a mask men from tho hillside hill-side have looked on where Its manor secrets lay In places they can see < j passages one hundred feet deep Hundreds of frightcrazed yellow f men escaped from tho flames carrying with them their opium pipes their money bags their silks and their children i child-ren Beside them ran the baggy trousered women and some of them hobbled painfully But these were the men and roomer of tho surface Far beneath tho street 1 levels In those cellars and passageways passage-ways were other lives Women whc never saw the day from their darkened prisons and blinking Jailers wore caught like rats In a huge trap Their very bones wero eaten by tho flames And now there remains only the holes They pit tho hillside like a multitude mul-titude of ground swallow nests The show depths which tho police novel j know The secrets of theso burrows will never be known for Into then the hungry fire first sifted Its ret coals obliterating everything except the earth Itself I |