from the top you can make out the wonderful and awesome sight of the plains that lie below, worn-out at the foot of the city. on the horizon tall brick chimneys, round and square, vomit billows of soot into the clouds, while little further down, barely passing over the flat roofs of workshops covered in bituminized felt and sheet-metal, whistling jets of white steam escape from thin aluminum flue-pipes... a great silence descends over the plain as the rumble of the city dies out little by little and the noise from distant factories reaches you but falteringly. sometimes, however, like a horrible complaint, you can hear the dull, raucous whistle of trains from the station as they pass, hidden by an embankment planted with acacias and ash trees... finally, in the distance, in the far distance, a large white road climbs a hill and looses itself in the sky, its summit crowned by a billow of dust, like a cloud stirred up by an invisible horse drawn cart, hidden by the curve of the earth.