>>24781386
It's November in London, and the Lord Chancellor is sitting in Lincon's Inn Hall. Shitty November weather. The streets look as if the waters of the Flood have receded mere moments ago. It won't be surprise to meet a dinosaur the size of an elephant waddling up Holborn Hill.
Smoke lowers down from chimneys and turns into a soft black drizzle. Its flakes are as big as snowflakes in December in Maine. They are so black it seems as if they're mourning the death of the sun. The sooty mire is so thick you can't see dogs in it. You can recognize horse only by their blinkers. Miserable and irritated pedestrians bump their umbrellas and slip at street-corners where others pedestrian have slipped and slid since morning (if the morning ever started on this day). Each fall adds fresh layer of mud unto the old and crusty layers that smear the streets on these corners.
It's foggy. Fog crawls up the river and flows amidst islands and meadows. Fog slides down the river and rolls among rows of ships and polluted water of a great but dirty city. Fog hangs on the Essex marshes. Fog covers the hills of Kent. Fog creeps into kitchens of ships. Fog lays on the shipyard. Fog covers the rigging of big ships. Fog droops on gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog hangs in the eyes and throats of Greenwich old folk that wheeze by the fires of their wards. Fog is in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of an angry captain down in his cabin. Fog pinches the toes and fingers and contracts the balls of a shivering apprentice boy on deck. Random people on the bridges peep over the edge into a fog, and it looks as if they are in a balloon high up among the clouds.
Gas looms through the fog in manifold places on the streets in the way the sun reflects from wet fields and accompanies farmers and plowers. Most of the shops were lighted two hours before the schedule, and the gas has an exhausted an unwilling look as a result, like Betty, 13, with perky blossoming teats, when she comes into my office every Friday, at noon.
The afternoon is rawest, foggiest, muddiest near Temple Bar. The gray look of this threshold represent well the gray and old corporation within it. The Lord High Chancellor sit in his High Court of Chancery near Temple Bar, in Lincon's Inn Hall, in the epicentre of the fog.
The thickest fog and deepest mud and mire doesn't come close to the lost and struggling state of the High Court of Chancery. Nothing in the Dark Tower multiverse holds a candle to the blind and grasping and most wretched and sinful state of this place.