Indeed, he always felt that Government stood alone and desperate, with its back to the wall.

He was too quixotic to have cared for it otherwise.
He walked on the Embankment once under a dark red sunset.

The red river reflected the red sky, and they both reflected his anger.

The sky, indeed, was so swarthy, and the light on the river relatively so lurid, that the water almost seemed of fiercer flame than the sunset it mirrored.

It looked like a stream of literal fire winding under the vast caverns of a subterranean country.
Syme was shabby in those days.