midnight
Nevertheless an unusual barometrical depression had brought in its train several days of disagreeable , stormy weather . The Japanese had been fully prepared for a battle with the San Francisco forts and with the few warships stationed in the harbor . The fact that they found such a strong ally in the fog was beyond all their hopes and strategical calculations . When the sun sank in the waves of the Pacific on the sixth of May , every Japanese had his orders for the next few hours , and the five thousand men whose part it was to attend to the work to be accomplished in San Francisco on the morning of the seventh , disappeared silently into the subterranean caves and cellars of the Chinese quarter , to fetch their weapons and be ready for action soon after midnight . _ Chapter VIII _ It was thought that the earthquake had done away forever with the underground labyrinth of the Chinese quarter -- those thousands of pens inhabited by creatures that shunned the light of day , those mole-holes which served as headquarters for a subterranean agitation , the mysterious methods of which have never been revealed to the eye of the white man . When had the old Chinatown been laid out ; when had those hidden warehouses , those opium dens and hiding-places of the Mongolian proletariat been erected , those dens in which all manner of criminals celebrated their indescribable orgies and which silently hid all these evil-doers from the far-reaching arm of the police ?