the horizon, that nest of cloud in which the city strove and panted
like an engine shrouded in its own steam. But to Bibbs, who had
now to go to the very heart of it, for a commanded interview with
his father, the distant cloud was like an implacable genius issuing
thunderously in smoke from his enchanted bottle, and irresistibly
drawing Bibbs nearer and nearer.

They passed from the farm lands, and came, in the amber light of
November late afternoon, to the farthermost outskirts of the city;
and here the sky shimmered upon the verge of change from blue to
gray; the smoke did not visibly permeate the air, but it was there,
nevertheless--impalpable, thin, no more than the dust of smoke.
And then, as the car drove on, the chimneys and stacks of factories
came swimming up into view like miles of steamers advancing abreast,
every funnel with its vast plume, savage and black, sweeping to the
horizon, dripping wealth and dirt and suffocation over league on
league already rich and vile with grime.

The sky had become only a dingy thickening of the soiled air;
and a roar and clangor of metals beat deafeningly on Bibbs's ears.
And now the car passed two great blocks of long brick buildings,
hideous in all ways possible to make them hideous; doorways showing
dark one moment and lurid the next with the leap of some virulent
interior flame, revealing blackened giants, half naked, in passionate
action, struggling with formless things in the hot illumination.
And big as these shops were, they were growing bigger, spreading over
a third block, where two new structures were mushrooming to completion
in some hasty cement process of a stability not over-reassuring.
Bibbs pulled the rug closer about him, and not even the phantom of
color was left upon his cheeks as he passed this place, for he knew