Show f t f 1 1 CHINA CHINATOWN SECRETS PERISH lERISH WITH THE BURNING OF OP SAN F FRANCISCO Underground Passages Wherein Many Prisoners and aud Mysteries Were Reduced to Ashes and Oblivion Los Angeles Cal For For the first time in half a the depths of oi Chinatown are open to the eyes ol ot white men said W W. W. W Overton who reached Los Angeles among the refugees refu refu- refugees gees No heap of smoking ruins marks the sight of the wooden warrens where the slat slat- slat eyed eyed men of the Orient dwelt in thousands The place is pitted with deep holes and seared with dark passageways passageways pas pas- from whose depths come smoke wreaths All the wood has gone and the winds are streaking the ashes Men white men Inen never knew the depth of Chinatowns Chinatown's underground city says Mr Overton They often talked of these subterranean runways I And many of them had gone beneath the street levels two and three stories But now that Chinatown has been unmasked unmasked un un- masked for the destroyed buildings were only a mask men from the hillside hillside hill hill- side have looked on where its Inner Secrets secrets Se se- e- e crets lay In places they can see passages feet deep The fire swept this Mongolian Mongolian Mon Mon- golian gollan section clean It left no shred of the painted wooden fabric It ate down to the bare ground and this lies stark for the breeze have taken away the light ashes Joss houses and mission schools grocery stores and opium dens gambling gambling gambling gamb gamb- ling hells and theaters theaters all all of them went Th buildings blazed up like tissue paper lanterns when the guttering guttering gut gut- candle touched their sides From this place I saw saw- hundreds of frenzied yellow men flee In their arms arms' they bore their opium opium pipes their money bags their silks and their chil chil- dren Beside them ran the baggy women and some of them hobbled d painfully These were men and women of the surface Far beneath the streets in those cellars and passageways were other lives Women who never saw the day from their darkened darken d prisons and blinking jailers were caught like rats in a huge trap Their very bones were eaten by the flames And now there remain only the holes They pit the hillside like a multitude mul of ground swallow nests They shows depths which the police never knew The secrets of those burrows will never be known for into them the hungry fire first sifted its red coals and then licked eagerly in tongues of creeping flames finally obliterating everything except the earth itself |