From my high window in central Dockland, as from a watch tower, I look
out over a tumbled waste of roofs and chimneys, a volcanic desert,
inhabited only by sparrows and pigeons. Humanity burrows in swarms
below that surface of crags, but only faint cries tell me that the
rocks are caverned and inhabited, that life flows there unseen through
subterranean galleries. Often, when the sunrise over the roofs is
certainly the coming of Aurora, as though then the first illumination
of the sky heralded the veritable dayspring for which we look, and the
gods were nearly here, I have watched for that crust beneath, which
seals the sleepers under, to heave and roll, to burst, and for released
humanity to pour through fractures, from the lower dark, to be renewed
in the fires of the morning. Nothing has happened yet. But I am
confident it would repay society to appoint another watcher when I am
gone, to keep an eye on the place.

Right below my window there are two ridges running in parallel jags of
chimneys, with a crevasse between them to which I can see no bottom.
But a roadway is there. From an acute angle of the window a cornice
overhangs a sheer fall of cliff. That is as near the ground as can be
got from my outlook. Several superior peaks rise out of the
wilderness, where the churches are; and beyond the puzzling middle
distance, where smoke dissolves all form, loom the dock warehouses, a
continuous range of far dark heights. I have thoughts of a venturesome
and lonely journey by moonlight, in and out of the chimney stacks, and
all the way to the distant mountains. It looks inviting, and possible,
by moonlight. And, indeed, any bright day in summer, from my window,
Dockland with its goblin-like chimneys might be the enchanted country
of a child's dream, where shapes, though inanimate, are watchful and
protean. From that silent world legions of grotesques move out of the
shadows at a touch of sunlight, and then, when you turn on them in