The heavy gold glamour of approaching sunset lay over all the colliery district, and the ugliness overlaid with beauty was like a narcotic to the senses.

On the roads silted with black dust, the rich light fell more warmly, more heavily, over all the amorphous squalor a kind of magic was cast, from the glowing close of day.
'It has a foul kind of beauty, this place,' said Gudrun, evidently suffering from fascination.

'Can't you feel in some way, a thick, hot attraction in it?
I can.

And it quite stupifies me.' They were passing between blocks of miners' dwellings.

In the back yards of several dwellings, a miner could be seen washing himself in the open on this hot evening, naked down to the loins, his great trousers of moleskin slipping almost away.