| 317 | 318 | 319 | 320 | 321 |
| 1 | 133 | 265 | 398 | 530 |
|
severity, and every exertion increased them. But they wrung from her
no complaint, or look of suffering; and, though the two travellers
proceeded very slowly, they did proceed. Clearing the town in course
of time, they began to feel that they were fairly on their way.
A long suburb of red brick houses - some with patches of garden-
ground, where coal-dust and factory smoke darkened the shrinking
leaves, and coarse rank flowers, and where the struggling vegetation
sickened and sank under the hot breath of kiln and furnace, making
them by its presence seem yet more blighting and unwholesome than
in the town itself - a long, flat, straggling suburb passed, they came,
by slow degrees, upon a cheerless region, where not a blade of grass
was seen to grow, where not a bud put forth its promise in the spring,
where nothing green could live but on the surface of the stagnant
pools, which here and there lay idly sweltering by the black road-side.
Advancing more and more into the shadow of this mournful place, its
dark depressing influence stole upon their spirits, and filled them with
a dismal gloom. On every side, and far as the eye could see into the
heavy distance, tall chimneys, crowding on each other, and presenting
that endless repetition of the same dull, ugly form, which is the horror
of oppressive dreams, poured out their plague of smoke, obscured the
light, and made foul the melancholy air. On mounds of ashes by the
wayside, sheltered only by a few rough boards, or rotten pent-house
roofs, strange engines spun and writhed like tortured creatures;
clanking their iron chains, shrieking in their rapid whirl from time to
time as though in torment unendurable, and making the ground
tremble with their agonies. Dismantled houses here and there
appeared, tottering to the earth, propped up by fragments of others
that had fallen down, unroofed, windowless, blackened, desolate, but
yet inhabited. Men, women, children, wan in their looks and ragged in
attire, tended the engines, fed their tributary fire, begged upon the
road, or scowled half-naked from the doorless houses. Then came
more of the wrathful monsters, whose like they almost seemed to be in
their wildness and their untamed air, screeching and turning round
and round again; and still, before, behind, and to the right and left,
was the same interminable perspective of brick towers, never ceasing
in their black vomit, blasting all things living or inanimate, shutting
out the face of day, and closing in on all these horrors with a dense
dark cloud.
But night-time in this dreadful spot! - night, when the smoke was
changed to fire; when every chimney spirited up its flame; and places,
that had been dark vaults all day, now shone red-hot, with figures
moving to and fro within their blazing jaws, and calling to one another
with hoarse cries - night, when the noise of every strange machine
was aggravated by the darkness; when the people near them looked
wilder and more savage; when bands of unemployed labourers
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