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One river was milk-white with sulphur precipitate, the other had red water, probably owing to iron deposits. The water was warm, and grew still warmer the farther up we followed the river. Suddenly we came upon a bare slope, over certain spots of which steam-clouds hung, while penetrating fumes irritated one's eyes and nose.
The very name of Bombay, which for most people recalls a spacious and dignified landfall, lateen sails, green islands and jutting precipices, a long city of trees and buildings like a bright and various breakwater between the great harbor and the sea, and then exquisite little temples, painted bullock carriages, Towers of Silence, Parsis, and an amazingly kaleidoscopic population, is for me a reminder of narrow, foetid, plague-stricken streets and tall insanitary tenement-houses packed and dripping with humanity, and of terrible throbbing factories working far into the night, blazing with electric light against the velvet-black night-sky of India, damp with the steam-clouds that are maintained to moisten the thread, and swarming with emaciated overworked brown children for even the adults, spare and small, in those mills seem children to a western eye.
The lava, now pouring in red-hot streams into the sea, caused steam-clouds to rise, so that the island disappeared behind a luminous veil. None of the savages escaped, for we saw no canoes making from the shore. Thus vanished the Island of Gems, with its treasure of jewels and gold, the dross of the world, in the pursuit of which so many risk their lives.
There they were given tools. Then the little band filed silently down river under the stars. Jimmy led them, his hands deep in his pockets, puffing white steam-clouds at regular intervals from his "meerschaum" pipe. After twenty minutes they struck the Water Works, then the board-walk of Canal Street. The word passed back for silence.
This soon drew the vapour up again from the valley, and white steam-clouds sailed slowly across the landscape.
"There is the snow!" said the widow. "And see the vapours! the tumbling, rolling vapours that we call steam-clouds! Look how the lightning flash darts out of them! and how the sea seems swelling and boiling up to meet the vapours! A little way from the land, the wind catches the spray and carries it up and away.
The instantaneous blinding glare of the intense fire shot through the surrounding darkness, lighting up the two men and the tender as if all were made of red-hot metal; flooding the smoke and steam-clouds overhead with round masses and curling lines of more subdued light, and sending sharp gleams through the murky atmosphere into dark space beyond, where the ghostly landscape appeared to rush wildly by.
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