Another scow followed us. I had heard that there were two working their way north from the Thames-end of this effluent. Ahead of us and behind us, a dozen small, narrow punts flitted along with our strange fleet, men at the bows and sterns with poles in their hands, men amidships with rifles and shotguns and pistols.

There were rifles and shotguns and pistols in hand here in the lead scow as well. I understood that many of the silent men in their dark workingmen’s clothes were former sharpshooters from the Army or Metropolitan Police. Not being a fancier of things military, I had never seen so many firearms in one place before. I would not have guessed that London had so many private men with arms.

The long river-sewer tunnel was black and foetid, but at the moment it was filled with beams and spheres of light as men in the scows and on the punts added their shifting bullseye lantern shafts to the cyclopean glare of the massive carbide searchlights. Shouts echoed back and forth through the stench. Along with the dozens of men in the various boats, more dozens were striding along the narrow stone or brick walkways on each side of the curving waterway and they also carried lanterns and weapons.

We had not been required to return to St Ghastly Grim’s Cemetery for our descent into this part of Undertown (and, in truth, Dear Reader, I do not believe I would have been capable of doing so). There were new corridors and stairways—part of a future underground railroad complex, I understood—that connected to the ancient catacombs that had been part of the Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington and we simply had to clatter down well-lighted stairs, through less-lighted tunnels, down more stairs, through a brief but confusing labyrinth of still-reeking catacombs, then down ladders to the new sewers that were to connect the Main Drainage Works at Crossness to the still-incomplete Embankment Works, and then lower again down narrow shafts and ancient tunnels to true Undertown.

I have no idea how they got the scows and punts and searchlights down.

Our advance was anything but silent. Besides the echoing shouts and footfalls and occasional gunshot explosions as someone picked off an aggressive rat—the vermin swam and swarmed in front of our scow and the accompanying punts like a rippling river of brown backs—there were also frequent explosions from ahead of us that were so painfully loud I had to cover my ears.

Small sewer outlets, some no more than three feet across, some much larger—all tributaries to or from our primary Fleet Ditch river channel here—branched off at irregular intervals from both sides of the curving brick vault. Most were covered with corroded and slime-covered grates and grilles. Inspector Field brusquely ordered those grilles blown off with applications of gunpowder that had been brought down and sent along with the advance parties on foot and in punts.

The terrible booms—amplified beyond endurance by the vaulted brick sewer architecture—crashed every few minutes, making me think of some terrible Crimean battlefield with artillery to the left of us, artillery to the right of us, artillery straight ahead of us, and so forth.

It was intolerable, especially to nerve-ends that had been denied sleep for at least three days and nights, muscles and bones which had been drugged and left for dead in the dark, and senses which were even now screaming in pain and protest. I reached into my valise that I had brought along from Tunbridge Wells and drank four more doses of laudanum.

Suddenly the stench became worse. I set my handkerchief over my mouth and nose, but it did little to filter the eye-watering stink.

Inspector Field carried no visible weapon, but he was swathed in a black winter cape-coat, had a wide-brimmed countryman’s hat pulled low, and showed a blood-red scarf wrapped several times around his neck. The red scarf also covered the lower half of his face. Any weapon might have been hidden in a pocket beneath the folds of that cape.

He had not said a single word to me when the four black-coated wraiths and then Reggie Barris delivered me to Undertown and then to the scow, but now Inspector Field—between distant explosions—recited:

“How dare

Your dainty nostrils (in so hot a season

When every clerk eats artichokes and peason,

Laxative lettuce, and such windy meat)

’Tempt such a passage? When each privy’s seat

Is filled with buttock, and the walls do sweat

Urine and plasters?”

Barris and Field’s other underlings stared at him as if he had gone mad, but I laughed. “You and Charles Dickens have something in common, Inspector.”

“Yes?” The old man’s dark, bushy eyebrow arched above the red slash of scarf.

“You both seem to know Ben Jonson’s ‘On the Famous Voyage’ by heart,” I said.

“What learnèd man would not?” said Inspector Field.

“Indeed,” I said, feeling the magical laudanum somewhat reviving my all-but-extinguished spirits, “there seems to be an entire genre of sewer writing, sewer poetry.”

“A synecdoche for the filth of the city squatting above us in all its cloacal corruption,” said Inspector Field. The old man was showing me a rough alliterative eloquence that I never would have expected from our earlier encounters and conversations. Or, far more likely, he was very drunk.

“Would you care to hear some of Swift’s ‘Description of a City Shower’?” he continued. “I trust that you, a writer, Master Wilkie Collins, know that Swift did not mean a rain shower. Or, more appropriate to our reeking Fleet Ditch sewer odyssey, perchance you would care to hear a recitation of Book Two of Pope’s scatological Dunciad?”

“Perhaps another time,” I said.

THE FLEET DITCH widened until it became a true underground river, wide enough for eight or nine of our scows and punts to advance together. The brick roof of the sewer also disappeared as we entered a quarter mile or more of actual cavern—the ragged roof here rising high and unseen above layers of fog or steam or smoke. To the right of the river’s course here a dozen grated sewer pipes, some ten or more feet in diameter, spilled their steaming effluent into the main current, but on the left side there came into sight low, broad shelves of mud and rubble—a sort of riverbank or shore. Rising above these rubbled dikes to a height of a hundred feet or more were ledges, openings, niches, and glimpses of tunnel-intersected crypts, ancient caverns, and deep cellars beneath cellars arrayed high on this cavern’s pockmarked wall like multi-storeyed buildings on the Strand.

As we drifted closer to the rubbled shore, I looked up and saw movement—people in rags peering over low walls, campfires flickering, miserable rags hung out on washlines over the abyss, ladders and crude bridgings connecting the subterranean tenements.

Charles Dickens had always imagined that he had plumbed the depths of London’s slums, learned the pathetic ways of the poorest of the poor in our capital, but here—far beneath the surface—was evidence that there were those poorer than the poorest of the poor in the rotting, typhus-lashed slums above.

I could see families in the hovels and on the high ledges now, what I took to be children dressed in a mere motley of filthy rags, all peering out at us or down at us in alarm, as if we were Vikings raiding some history-forgotten, God-forsaken Saxon settlement. The niches in the high wall, each holding hovels made of canvas and broken brick and mud bricks and old tin, reminded me of illustrations I had seen of abandoned Red Indian cliff dwellings in canyons somewhere in the American West or Southwest. Only these cliff dwellings were anything but abandoned; I estimated that hundreds of people were living in these high holes in the rock here far beneath the city.