"The City of Dreadful Night" paints a gritty, dark picture of a hot summer night within a walled city in the Orient. The narrator steps over sleeping people which mimic corpses—and vividly depicts what he sees, feels, and hears in this death-like city. Also included in this collection are "The Giridih Coal-Fields" and "Among the Railway Folk," reports from a trip Kipling made to the East India Railway Company's coal fields and headquarters.