And then, as the car drove on, the chimneys and stacks of factories
came swimming up into view like miles of steamers advancing abreast,
every funnel with its vast plume, savage and black, sweeping to the
horizon, dripping wealth and dirt and suffocation over league on
league already rich and vile with grime.
The sky had become only a dingy thickening of the soiled air;
and a roar and clangor of metals beat deafeningly on Bibbs's ears.
And now the car passed two great blocks of long brick buildings,
hideous in all ways possible to make them hideous; doorways showing
dark one moment and lurid the next with the leap of some virulent
interior flame, revealing blackened giants, half naked, in passionate
action, struggling with formless things in the hot illumination.
And big as these shops were, they were growing bigger, spreading over
a third block, where two new structures were mushrooming to completion
in some hasty cement process of a stability not over-reassuring.
Bibbs pulled the rug closer about him, and not even the phantom of
color was left upon his cheeks as he passed this place, for he knew
it too well. Across the face of one of the buildings there was an
enormous sign: "Sheridan Automatic Pump Co.
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