these pile structures across the broad gray sweep of water and air. It marks the gates of the lowest docks, and here, for the river, psychological London begins. It does not much matter whether the ship turns in there at Tilbury or whether it works up to the docks in Gallions Reach, or to the others in the heart of town itself. Work for them ends there.
It is taken up by the red-sailed barges. They tack in their engrossed manner across and across the wide reaches; they pass under the shadow of dull clouds, of rain squalls, under watery sunlight, the arms of aligned cranes, the smoke from factory chimneys. They linger, going about, in front of bluffs covered with gray buildings and black trees; in exposed stretches of water they are covered, right over the hatches, by the wash from the sea-tarnished sides of steamers so vast, so silent in their motions, so centred in themselves, that as, from the deck of a barge, one looks at their passing, it is hard to realise that they and not the low banks that they obscure and seem to swallow up, are gliding by.
These barges running up from Rotherhithe or from much farther out to sea, pass cement factories, sand works, anchored groups of skiffs where sand is hauled laboriously in buckets from the bottom of the river; they pass petroleum depôts where, side by side, gray retorts are like those of gas works; they pass candle factories and manure warehouses. They tack about gravely one after another beside a black smallpox hospital that, out in the river, is one half ship and the other a pier with a dingy and mournful resemblance to those
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