And the great city was smitten by a blight.

It was not a fog, for one could see clearly a hundred yards ahead.

But there was no sky and the air was a queer yellow, almost olive green, in which the main buildings stood out in startling meanness, and the distant ones were providentially obscured.
Though it was but little past noon, all the great shops blazed with light, but they illuminated singularly little the yellow murk of the roadway.

The interiors were sharply clear.

We could see swarms of black things, seething with ant-like activity amid a phantasmagoria of colours, draperies, curtains, flashes of white linen, streaks of red and yellow meat gallant with rosettes and garlands, instantaneous, glistening vistas of gold, silver and crystal, warm reflections of mahogany and walnut; on the pavements an agglutinated yet moving mass by the shop fronts, the inner stream a garish pink ribbon of faces, the outer a herd of subfuse brown.