calls to the mass of sunrise,
some of the bells droning and indistinct like the voices of old women,
others shrill and high pitched like the chirping of children. From roof
to roof--their city quarters--cocks were exchanging strident challenges
to battle.

And now the deserted, rain-soaked streets were slowly awakening with
the strangely resonant sounds of footsteps, as the earliest risers
stepped out upon the sidewalks, though the closed doors and the grated
windows still transmitted the subdued murmur of a city in the last heavy
breathings of tranquil slumber. The sky was growing gradually brighter
as if numberless thin veils were being torn asunder one by one from
across the pathway of the invisible sun. A gray, cold pallor was
stealing over the darker alleys and side streets, while, like a fade-in
on the cinema screen, the contours of the town began to come into
clearer view: the fronts of the houses shining from their recent
drenching; the eaves dripping with the last few drops of rain; the roofs
gleaming like polished silver; the trees along the broader avenues,
naked and shorn as brooms, shaking their leafless branches, while water
seemed to ooze from their fungus-covered trunks.

The Gas House of Valencia, weary from its sustained labors of a night,
was snorting with the last puffs of steam. The huge gasometers were
sinking low between their steel girders; and the tall brick chimney was
throwing out its final belches of thick black smoke, which spread
curling over the field of space in an ever-widening blotch. In the
neighborhood of the Sea Bridge, the customs agents, burying their faces
in their mufflers, were walking up and down to shake off the damp chill
of the morning. Through the windows of the revenue office the clerks
who had just arrived could be seen moving their sleepy heads to and fro.

They had been waiting there for the vendors to come into town--a
quarrelsome crew trained to haggling and embittered by poverty, ready,
for the difference of a centime, to spend a limitless capital of
swear-words and insults, and never successful in reaching market without
a string of brawls with the guards who laid the duties on their goods.
The produce wagons and the milch cows with their rattling bells had gone
through before daybreak. Only the fisherwomen were still to come, a
noisy flock of witches, dirty, slimy, in rags, making the air ring with
their shrieks and wrangling, stinking to heaven with dead fish a