They left the blinding roar of the kilns behind. They stepped out into the cold, bitter salt-crusted alleys of the lower Salt Ward. The ground here was gray and brittle underfoot, covered in a skin of sodium melted rock waste that crunched like frozen snow beneath their heavy boots. In fifty paces, the heat plunged forty degrees, the dry heat of the reverberatory furnaces replaced by a biting, chemical downdraft that smelled of stale lye, damp soot, and old hard pipe-crust.
Above them, the sky was a featureless vault of total black. Eight hundred feet overhead on the granite ridge, the glass small roof-dome of the country Star tower caught the dim glow of town gas chimney pipes, glowing with the dull hue of tarnished brass against the dark. In the lower alleys, there were no copper street lamps. The Salt Ward was a heavy-duty barracks where kiln crews and bitter salt shovelers lived in unmortared brick apartments, lighting their doorways with foul-smelling animal fat tapers or shallow iron pans fed on rendered horse fat.
Through the gaps between the sagging doorways, Len caught glimpses of the ward’s civilian reality. Families huddled around iron wash-basins filled with smoldering coke, children wrapped in layers of patched sacking. The dry, hacking cough of elder shovelers whose lungs were scarred by thirty years of breathing airborne soda ash. Outside every stoop sat a small clay smudge pot burning sulfur shavings. The only cheap preservative that kept the damp mold from rotting their woolens…
