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Updated: May 11, 2025
The lonely man in the brown smoke-fog, with the roar of the river in his ears, as unregarded as the roar of traffic in a city, recalled it all, and laughed as he threw his hands abroad, and fell into a frowning thoughtfulness as he allowed them to drop laxly between his knees.
Paul Armstrong the real Paul Armstrong who dreamed these dreams of memory sat day by day in his mountain solitude surrounded by the smoke-fog which obliterated all but the nearer objects from his view. He could faintly distinguish the bluff on the other side of the cañon. It was like a pale, flat, and barely perceptible stain on grayish-brown paper.
The whole valley, the gully, the Bar, the very hillside they had just left, were blotted out by a creeping, stifling smoke-fog that scarcely rose breast high, but was beaten down or cut off cleanly by the violent wind that swept the higher level of the forest.
He took his seat upon his camp-stool, and shredded tobacco for his pipe, staring with vacant eyes into the smoke-fog which everywhere imprisoned his gaze, and in a minute he was back at his dreams again, and the past once more unrolled itself before him.
Then the town was fagged with the long winter and blacked with the heavier smoke that had been held close to the earth by the smoke-fog it bred. Every-thing was damply streaked with the soot: the walls of the houses, inside and out, the gray curtains at the windows, the windows themselves, the dirty cement and unswept asphalt underfoot, the very sky overhead.
The dripping horses scrambled up the slippery incline and then, under the goading of spurs and quirts, leaped forward as fast as they could go across the level, soggy plain. A quarter of a mile ahead of them lay the scattered shacks of the town, and as they drew nearer to it the riders could see the flashes of guns and the smoke-fog lying close to the ground.
The pictured image of himself he had so long followed in fancy drew closer, until he and it merged into each other, and the shade and he were one. He had listened all day for the accustomed clangour of the trains, and had heard nothing. The brown-red smoke-fog had grown denser and more dense, and now it stung throat and eyes with its acrid and pungent atoms.
The cloudland is very great, but a sunbeam makes all its nations and continents sudden with light. All this is for the untravelled. All the winds bring him this scenery. It is only in London, for part of the autumn and part of the winter, that the unnatural smoke-fog comes between. And for many and many a day no London eye can see the horizon, or the first threat of the cloud like a man's hand.
The first shadows of dusk were closing in, betokened by a thickening of the smoke-fog into which the Waterbug slowly plowed. To port a dimming shore line; to starboard, aft, and dead ahead, water and air merged in two boat lengths. Barlow leaned through the pilot-house window, one hand on the wheel, straining his eyes on their course.
To the eyes of the defenders there was only a picture of that smoke-fog, with a gray wall of men looming through it, moving, walking, running towards them, falling and rolling, and looming up again and coming on, melting away into tangled heaps that disappeared again behind advancing men, who in turn became more falling and fallen piles.
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