Here stopped, after its last wanderings, the monopolizing and voracious industry of the metropolis.
Therefore he was not a little surprised to find, beyond the petroleum reservoirs, towards the village of Austruweel—a pitiful bit of a village separated by strategic necessity from its parish and added to the urban region—an agglomeration of flimsy and provisional buildings, whose appearance was so troubled, so forbidding, so infernal, that Laurent was not far wrong in attributing a diabolic origin to claim his property, or as if he exercised an unavowable profession. The hovels must have shot up there like mushrooms growing in a single night in a damp spot, propitious also to the hatching of toads.
As a whole, it looked like a lazaretto, a dispensary, a horse-pound, a warehouse for contraband goods, or a clandestine still relegated to a district outside the zone of normal industries.
Disagreeably surprised, Laurent Paridael stopped in spite of himself before these interloping buildings, consisting of five bodies of buildings without floors, built of wreckage, loam, coarse plaster, of agglutinated materials, like a temporary thing of which only an ephemeral consistency was demanded.
Surrounded by a dilapidated wall of rotted handrails, it threw a discordant note into the grandiose and loyal harmony, into the impression of honest foundations produced upon him today by the panorama of Antwerp. These hovels, lacking any apparent purpose, intrigued Paridael more than he would have wished.
He was distracted from his examination by a dozen apprentices, boys and girls, who, hurrying along and chatting joyously, were going into precisely those suspicious sheds.
