10
STEEL'S GREAT CAPITAL
A man, traveling across the land for the very first time, slips into a strange town—after dark. It is his first time in the strange town, of course. Otherwise it would not be strange. He finds his hotel with little difficulty, for a taxicab takes him to it. He immediately discovers that it is not more than two squares from the very station at which he has arrived. Still a friendly taxicab in a strange town is not an institution at which to scoff, and the man who is very tired is glad to get into his hotel room and to bed without delay.
He awakes the next morning very early—at least it must be very early for it is still dark. It is dark indeed as he stumbles his way across the room to the electric switch. In the sudden radiance that follows, he sputters at himself for having arisen so early—for he is a man fond of his lazy sleep in the morning. He fumbles in his pockets and finds his watch. Ten minutes to nine, it says to him.
"Stopped," says the man, half aloud. "That's another time I forgot to wind it."
But the watch has not stopped. Insecure in his own mind he lifts it to his ear. It is ticking briskly. The man is perplexed. He goes to the window and peeps out from it. A great office building across the way is gaily alight—a strange performance for before dawn of a September morning. He looks down into the street. Two long files of brightly lighted cars are passing through the street, one up, the other down. The glistening pavements are peopled, the stores are brightly lighted—the man glances at his watch once again. Eight minutes of nine, it tells him this time.
He smiles as he gazes down into that busy street.
"This is Pittsburgh," he says.
Later that day that same man stands in another window—of a tall skyscraper this time—and again gazes down. Suspended there below him is a seeming chaos. There are smoke and fog and dirt there, through these—showing ever and ever so faintly—tall, artificial cliffs, punctured with row upon row of windows, brightly lighted at midday. From the narrow gorges between these cliffs come the rustle and the rattle of much traffic. It comes to the man in waves of indefinite sound.
He lifts his gaze and sees beyond these artificial cliffs, mountains—real mountains—towering, with houses upon their crests, and steep, inclined railroads climbing their precipitous sides. In these houses, also, there are lights burning at midday. Below them are great stacks—row upon row upon row of them, like coarse-toothed combs turned upside down—and the black smoke that pours up from them is pierced now and then and again by bright tongues of flame—the radiance of furnaces that glow throughout the night and day.
"We're mud and dirt up to our knees—and money all the rest of the way," says the owner of that office. He is a native of the city. He comes to the window and points to one of the rivers—a yellow-brown mirrored surface, scarcely glistening under leaden clouds but bearing long tows by the dozen—coal barges, convoyed by dirty stern-wheeled steamboats.