noon
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 . And in the roadway , through the translucent olive , the swirling traffic seemed like armies of ghosts mightily and dashingly charioted .