The oppressive stillness of the evening weighed heavily upon Raut. They
went side by side down the road in silence, and in silence turned into the
cinder-made byway that presently opened out the prospect of the valley.
A blue haze, half dust, half mist, touched the long valley with mystery.
Beyond were Hanley and Etruria, grey and dark masses, outlined thinly by
the rare golden dots of the street lamps, and here and there a gas-lit
window, or the yellow glare of some late-working factory or crowded
public-house. Out of the masses, clear and slender against the evening
sky, rose a multitude of tall chimneys, many of them reeking, a few
smokeless during a season of "play." Here and there a pallid patch and
ghostly stunted beehive shapes showed the position of a pot-bank or a
wheel, black and sharp against the hot lower sky, marked some colliery
where they raise the iridescent coal of the place. Nearer at hand was the
broad stretch of railway, and half-invisible trains shunted--a steady
puffing and rumbling, with every run a ringing concussion and a rhymthic
series of impacts, and a passage of intermittent puffs of white steam
across the further view.
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