precipitous and always so close to the tracks that their tops could
not be seen.

This was almost merciful, considering what had been done to the sky.
When the train did not sneak between hills of slag, cinders, rubbish,
garbage, dross and the bloody brown carrion of broken machinery, it
shot like a bolt in the groove of an arbolest between unbroken
barriers of advertising or through deep concrete troughs and roaring
tunnels full of grimy light and grubby air.

There was one inconsistancy in this scheme of things: Just as the
train emerged from a deep valley of slag-hills and swung into a long
curve, passengers on the left side had a panoramic view of the city--a
frozen scene of battle between geometrical monsters, made remote and
obscure by the dust of a thousand thousand merely human struggles, too
small to be visible from the crusty windows of the train by the merely
human eye. They had about one second in which to absorb this vision of
corporate purpose. Then they were plunging into a final stretch of
tunnel to the center of the city itself, where no surface was ever
more than fifteen paces away and where there were no horizons at all.

Dewforth was excited by this view even though it reached him in a
fragmentary and subliminal way. Day after day he told himself that he
would have all his faculties at the ready before the train swung into
the curve. But morning after morning he was still emerging from the
stale fumes of the preceding night's beer, or he allowed himself to be
hypnotized by the sound of the wheels or fascinated by the jiggling of
another passenger's earlobe at that critical moment. The train had
always entered the clangorous colon of the city before this resolve
could crystallize in his mind, and he was left with an impression
which lay somewhere in the scale of reality between the after-image of
a light bulb and the morning memory of a fever-dream. He could never
have described the scene except in loose generalities about buildings
of contrasting height and unemphatic color.

* * * * *

The single memorable feature of the panorama, looming above the rest,
was not even a building. It eluded all familiar categories. It was,
like the other components of the picture, rectangular; but it was a
displaced rectangle. A shining thread of morning sky could be seen
beneath it. It was only logical to suppose that it stood on legs of
some kind--a complicated process of girder