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The mules which draw the primitive ramshackle trams have the worst time of it, and are obliged to pull their load every now and again off one line on to another, being urged thereto with some brutality. But these trams do not run up the very hilly parts of the city; the main lines run along the Tagus east and west of the great Square of the Black Horse. And by the river the city is flat.
The garish vulgarity of the Goldhawk Road, along which a procession of electric trams rushed and whizzed, took away her breath. Devonport Road, in which she was to find the academy, was such a quiet, retiring little turning that Mavis could hardly believe it joined a noisy thoroughfare like the Goldhawk Road.
The earliest street sound, before the dawn breaks, is the rattle of the trams, the meat-carts on their way to the markets, the dust-carts and the watering-carts; and then, just as the grey thread of the dawn fringes the horizon, the hymn of the Fakir rings forth, praising the open-handed Ali and imploring the charity of the early-riser who knows full well that a copper bestowed unseen during the morning watch is worth far more than silver bestowed in the sight of men.
They sound much more aggressive than other trams I have heard, or else it is because my ears are tired tonight. There are double windows, though, which will shut out the noise while I'm practising and also shut it in.
The gathering darkness drew out the flare over the city, and, here and there, lamps dotted the road, until, turning up a short cut, he was into the region of trams once more. The lighted cars, filled with gay Burmese and soldiers from the British Regiment, and European-clad, dark-skinned creatures of mixed races, looked cheerful and encouraged to better thoughts.
He was accustomed to sleep in a silence that was only broken by the soft squeaking of the mice under the heat-grating; and the night-noises of the city the rumble of the electric trams, the shouts of night-wanderers all these unwonted sounds that pierced the darkness so startlingly, had filled, his sleep with feverish dreams and caused a series of ugly, deformed visions to pass through his brain.
It wasn't however that they didn't meet a little, none the less, in the southern quarter, to point for their common benefit the moral of their defeat. They crossed the river; they wandered in neighbourhoods sordid and safe; the winter was mild, so that, mounting to the top of trams, they could rumble together to Clapham or to Greenwich.
The main gate still looks out with the same expression of ancient well-proportioned kindliness upon St. Margaret's Close. There are imposing new science laboratories in Chambers Street indeed, but the old playing fields are unaltered except for the big electric trams that go droning and spitting blue flashes along the western boundary.
And then Wolfgar pointed out the surrounding hillsides. On them, cleared of their vegetation, our modern civilization stood gaunt and efficient. Towers, aerials, landing stages, aerial trams, factories, tall stacks over the dynamo houses belching thick black smoke, which artificial wind-generators carefully blew away from the city.
The hotels are perched around on the slopes of the hills, so that you may enter stately portals among the shops, but shall be whirled upwards in a lift to the main floor, whence you look down on the green and tidy miniature place. From my room in the Royat Palace Hotel I had a view across the Park, beyond which I could see the black crowds pouring out of the Clermont-Ferrand trams.
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