To begin at the beginning:
It is Spring, moonless night in the great city, starless and smoke-clogged, the brick chimneys belching and the hunched factories ringing and singing along the way down to the tar-thick, tar-black, crow-black, carrion-swallowing lake. The houses are blind as moles (though moles would not be seen on the shouting, hessian streets) or blind as Captain Flynn there in the harsh-lit hub by the pump and the town clock, the shops still trading, the Welfare Hall at untold toil. And the lucky few of the choked and jaded town are sleeping now.
Hush, the rich men are sleeping, the factory owners, the merchants and the architects, lordlings, high craftsmen, teachers and publicans, the engine masters and the engine makers, civil servants, church clerics, policemen, the fleet-footed messengers, and the fire-fighters. Their girls lie bedded soft and glide through their dreams, with silks and jewels, attended by servants in halls of nostalgic nobility. Their sons are dreaming wild wealth or of the success that is theirs by right and the prizes that will come. While the anthracite powers their virtue and glory, while lesser people work, while wheel-cogs turn and springs coil, while the smoke wraps around the city and tangles, cloying and softening, to make a cloud with the roofs.
You may hear the soot falling, and the soiled town choking.
Only your eyes are clear enough to see the living city, fast and slow alike.
And you alone can hear the gentle lap, the soft stir of the matt black lake where airships and steamers tilt and ride in their docks. See here the Discovery, Challenger and Atlantis, the Endeavour, the Colombia, the Apollo, the Gemini, and the Mercury.
Listen. It is the night moving through the streets, the simple slow staid musical hammering in Smith Gate, Silver Lane and Factor Row, it is churning gears on Industry Hill, footfalls, sootfalls, heartbeats of Under Smoke City.
Listen. It is night in the railway station, a hymn in stone and steel and steam-laced movements, hurrying people and shifting goods, singing like angel choirs, sucking resources, clip-clattering hallelujah; night in the four-ales, quiet as a hurricane; in the city dairies like the bovine bawls; in city bakeries flying like hot cakes. It is tonight in Donkey Street, clopping loudly, with coal dust on its hooves, along the broken cobbles, past failing flowers, signs and symbols, dead or dying sanctuaries, street-art by the troubled youth, wounded hearts and torn, hard-working bodies. It is night gambolling among the refuges of the poor.
Look. It is night, loudly, royally winding through stunted Green Avenue trees; pacing through the graveyards of Under Smoke City, tones echoed and soft, where hurt is shed; tumbling by the old Ship Inn.
Time passes. Listen. Time passes.
Come closer now.
Only you can hear both the houses sleeping and the factories working in the gas-lit streets of night. Only you can see, into blinded bedrooms, into shouting stores and whirring workshops, in the soot-covered sites, the gaunt galleries, the alert alleyways, and the dozing dreaming dust-darkened diggings of the dead. Only you can hear and see, behind the eyes of them all, the moments and heartbeats of hope and desire and failure and weakness and want and need, the peaks and troughs that shape the rough waters of their dreams.
From where you are, you can hear their dreams.