Herrería

Steep walls of rust-coloured rock pinch the valley so tightly that the town climbs them in terraces of red brick, row over row, each roofline stepping up from the one below. Three black steel headframes stand over the pit shafts at the bottom of the slope. Their wheels are still. Nothing turns. Below them a square of soot-dark stone holds the company offices, a store with green shutters, the lamp room and the long pithead baths, all lit sodium yellow. Soot sits on every sill. Smelter row runs downhill from there, and its chimneys push a red glow up onto the low cloud. A narrow slag railway climbs out of the ore yard toward grey heaps above town, its tip-cars glowing orange as they cool. Higher up, a wooden-shingled chapel leans into the hill among allotments and washing lines strung between houses. Brass, brick and rust. Smoke drifts low. Evening goes violet above the ridges, and far overhead one cold blue patch of snow still holds the last of the sun.