Friday's Nasties: L'assimilazione

This volume of Friday's, L'assimilazione, if we were to continue the corollary from the previous volume, as the gates open to the City of Id, our hero sees two or three things which leave a lasting impression on life as it is, forever. Not far from the gate a young girl works on a boulevard breaking bricks one at a time to pave the road. She is not timid, neither fast, nor slow, but diligent, and industrious. There must be a hundred or two hundred bricks that she breaks in a day, maybe more. A young woman, further ahead, carries bricks on her head, ten maybe twenty at a time. During the night, some distance away from the gate, a crew of workers chisel into a road with hammers, by gaslight, to patch broken streets. Further in, there are children lighting fireworks, rockets, fountains, spinning wheels, bombs. The air crackles. At the edge of the city, the dockworkers wave farewell to three ships that set sail; the Camille, the Clover, and the Cecilia. The age of the modern begins.