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.,
Inc."

Thence they went through streets of wooden houses, all grimed, and
adding their own grime from many a sooty chimney; flimsey wooden houses
of a thousand flimsy whimsies in the fashioning, built on narrow lots
and nudging one another crossly, shutting out the stingy sunlight from
one another; bad neighbors who would destroy one another root and branch
some night when the right wind blew. They were only waiting for that
wind and a cigarette, and then they would all be gone together--a pinch
of incense burned upon the tripod of the god.

Along these streets there were skinny shade-trees, and here and there
a forest elm or walnut had been left; but these were dying. Some people
said it was the scale; some said it was the smoke; and some were sure
that asphalt and "improving" the streets did it; but Bigness was in
too Big a hurry to bother much about trees. He had telegraph-poles
and telephone-poles and electric-light-poles and trolley-poles by the
thousand to take their places. So he let the trees die and put up his
poles. They were hideous, but nobody minded that; and sometimes the
wires fell and killed people--but not often enough to matter at all.

Thence onward the car bore Bibbs through the older parts of the
town where the few solid old houses not already demolished were in
transition: some, with their fronts torn away, were being made into
segments of apartment-buildings; others had gone uproariously into
trade, brazenly putting forth "show-