“This upward scramble was short, and we soon found ourselves tramping along a broad road of flat roofs, broader than many big thoroughfares, with chimney-pots here and there that seemed in the haze as bulky as small forts.  The asphyxiation of the fog seemed to increase the somewhat swollen and morbid anger under which my brain and body laboured.  The sky and all those things that are commonly clear seemed overpowered by sinister spirits.  Tall spectres with turbans of vapour seemed to stand higher than the sun or moon, eclipsing both.  I thought dimly of illustrations to the `Arabian Nights’ on brown paper with rich but sombre tints, showing genii gathering round the Seal of Solomon.  By the way, what was the Seal of Solomon?  Nothing to do with sealing-wax really, I suppose; but my muddled fancy felt the thick clouds as being of that heavy and clinging substance, of strong opaque colour, poured out of boiling pots and stamped into monstrous emblems.

“The first effect of the tall turbaned vapours was that discoloured look of pea-soup or coffee brown of which Londoners commonly speak.  But the scene grew subtler with familiarity.  We stood above the average of the housetops and saw something of that thing called smoke, which in great cities creates the strange thing called fog.  Beneath us rose a forest of chimney-pots.  And there stood in every chimney-pot, as if it were a flower-pot, a brief shrub or a tall tree of coloured vapour.  The colours of the smoke were various; for some chimneys were from firesides and some from factories, and some again from mere rubbish heaps.  And yet, though the tints were all varied, they all seemed unnatural, like fumes from a witch’s pot.  It was as if the shameful and ugly shapes growing shapeless in the cauldron sent up each its separate spurt of steam, coloured according to the fish or flesh consumed.  Here, aglow from underneath, were dark red clouds, such as might drift from dark jars of sacrificial blood; there the vapour was dark indigo gray, like the long hair of witches steeped in the hell-broth.  In another place the smoke was of an awful opaque ivory yellow, such as might be the disembodiment of one of their old, leprous waxen images.  But right across it ran a line of bright, sinister, sulphurous green, as clear and crooked as Arabic—­”

Mr. Moses Gould once more attempted the arrest of the ’bus.  He was understood to suggest that the reader should shorten the proceedings by leaving out all the adjectives.  Mrs. Duke, who had woken up, observed that she was sure it was all very nice, and the decision was duly noted down by Moses with a blue, and by Michael with a red pencil.  Inglewood then resumed the reading of the document.

“Then I read the writing of the smoke.  Smoke was like the modern city that makes it; it is not always dull or ugly, but it is always wicked and vain.