"The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth."
"...the dark ‘interlopers’ of the Eastern trade."
"They were men enough to face the darkness."
"Light came out of this river since—you say Knights? Yes; but it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker—may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday."
"Something like an emissary of light, something like a lower sort of apostle."