Nor is the Country Club at the summit of this range of hills. Back of it
rise other roads, the most picturesque of them being Altamont Road,
which runs to the top of Red Mountain, reaching a height about
equivalent to that of the cornice line of Birmingham's tallest building.
The houses of this region are built on streets which, like some streets
of Portland, are terraced into the hillside, and the resident of an
upper block can almost look down the chimneys of his neighbors on the
block below. The view commanded from these mountain perches does not
suggest that the lower city runs up into the Highlands. It seems to be a
separate place, down in a distant valley, and the sense of its
remoteness is heightened by the thin veil of gray smoke which wafts from
the tall smokestacks of far-off iron furnaces, softening the serrated
outlines of the city and wrapping its tall buildings in the industrial
equivalent for autumn haze.
At night the scene from the Highlands is even more spectacular, for at
brief intervals the blowing of a converter in some distant steel plant
illuminates the heavens with a great hot glow, like that which rises and
falls about the crater of a volcano in eruption. Thus the city's vast
affairs are kept before it by day in a pillar of cloud, and by night in
a pillar of fire.
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