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Eight or ten massive and dreary-looking stacks of chimneys rose out of the smoking piles. In the centre of the desolation was the stone basement of the block-house, on which still stood a few gloomy masses of the timber, resembling coal. The naked and unsupported shaft of the well reared its circular pillar from the centre, looking like a dark monument of the past.
The hillsides were often terraced, as in Italy, and the culture apparently close and conscientious. The farmhouses looked friendly and comfortable; at places the landscape was molested by some sort of manufactories which could not conceal their tall chimneys, though they kept the secret of their industry.
There was not one straight floor from the foundation to the roof; the ceilings were so fantastically clouded by smoke and dust, that old women might have told fortunes in them better than in grouts of tea; the dead-cold hearths showed no traces of having ever been warmed but in heaps of soot that had tumbled down the chimneys, and eddied about in little dusky whirlwinds when the doors were opened.
The windows, lit up by the flush of the setting sun, glowed like live coals; in the foreground, just below San Francisco el Grande, bulked the red tanks of the gas factory with their high steel beams, amidst the obscure rubbish-heaps; from the centre of the city rose tiny towers and low chimneys which belched forth black puffs of smoke that seemed to rest motionless in the tranquil atmosphere.
They could see the twisted chimneys rising over the top of a thick grove of trees and shrubs, so they turned their steps in that direction. Over some grassy park-like land they tramped, where rabbits were still scuttling about, and a few tame deer were grazing; then through a thicket of trees and under a belt of ornamental shrubs.
A westerly gale, with now and again tumultuous violence of rain, rattled the many panes of the windows, wailed in every crevice of door and casement, roared through the mile-long elm avenue below, and roared in the chimneys above. The Prince of the Power of the Air was let loose, and announced his presence as with the shout of battle.
The deserted white man's house gradually disappears. A clapboard is gone, and then another, and finally all. The skeleton of the frame remains: months pass away; piece by piece the joists disappear; some morning they are found tumbled in a heap, and at last nothing is left save the cellar and chimneys.
To the right of the spectator, who stood on the eminence occupied by the cemetery, lay Ridgeley, with its environing outhouses, crowning the most ambitious height of the chain, the smoke from its chimneys and those of the village of cabins beating laboriously upward, to be borne down at last by the lowering mass of chilled vapor.
The illusion remained with them and qualified the impression which Hamburg made by her much-trolleyed Bostonian effect; by the decorous activity and Parisian architecture of her business streets; by the turmoil of her quays, and the innumerable masts and chimneys of her shipping.
"Turkey and the Mongol lands have kept the old cult going. In England, it's only for the dog!" He laughed freely but noiselessly at his own joke. This talk had followed the news brought by Krool to the Baas, that the sub-manager of the great mine, whose chimneys could be seen from the hill behind the house, had thrown himself down the shaft and been smashed to a pulp.
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