midnight
Even the thousand vivid incidents of the great conflagration were always to come back to him with this haunting sense of unreality , the feeling that it was not actually he but some one else who had witnessed and shared and lived through them -- some one not alien , yet not wholly kin to himself . The gray and ochre smoke haze , and the diffused heat , and the sense of intimate danger long faced and hence grown hardly noted , clouded and filmed the facts , the colors , and the emotions of this day in the dim light of a dream . They were wild facts , too ; great deeds ; and glorious colors , which would have been worth a clearer recollection . The color of the midnight sky , its velvet blackness shot with crimson gleams . The waves of smoke , now like densest ink pouring up from some unseen funereal funnel -- now blindingly white , flung like the plume of Navarre above the tumult of the fray . The tall , cold buildings standing almost defiantly in the winter air , lifting their immobile fronts to face the onrush -- and the same buildings a little later , when the flames had passed , leaving only gnawed skeletons and heaped and smoldering ruins in their wake . The grim and terrible anguish of twisted steel girders that lay writhen like petrified snakes among the ashes , or lifted their tortured length to reach some last hold on sanity at the wall which they had once helped maintain .