Meantime, here and there, like awaiting hearses, the coal-scows drifted along, poled broadside, pell-mell to the current.
And as that tide in the water swept all craft on, so a like tide seemed hurrying all men, all horses, all vehicles on the land.

As ant-hills, the bridge arches crawled with processions of carts, coaches, drays, every sort of wheeled, rumbling thing, the noses of the horses behind touching the backs of the vehicles in advance, all bespattered with ebon mud--ebon mud that stuck like Jews' pitch.

At times the mass, receiving some mysterious impulse far in the rear, away among the coiled thoroughfares out of sight, would, start forward with a spasmodic surge.
It seemed as if some squadron of centaurs, on the thither side of Phlegethon, with charge on charge, was driving tormented humanity, with all its chattels, across.
Whichever way the eye turned, no tree, no speck of any green thing was seen--no more than in smithies.

All laborers, of whatsoever sort, were hued like the men in foundries.

The black vistas of streets were as the galleries in coal mines; the flagging, as flat tomb-stones, minus the consecration of moss, and worn heavily down, by sorrowful tramping, as the vitreous rocks in the cursed Gallipagos, over which the convict tortoises crawl.
As in eclipses, the sun was hidden; the air darkened; the whole dull, dismayed aspect of things, as if some neighboring volcano, belching its premonitory smoke, were about to whelm the great town, as Herculaneum and Pompeii, or the Cities of the Plain.