black celestial celerity , brooding and billowing , is at last an ablution from clouds deluging filth and stench of this muggy city , beating down the sweltering heat and the exhaust of traffic so thick , dark , and tangible that without the rain looks to be more than a gas , the smoke of sidewalk restaurants on every street now asphyxiatingly curtailed under large umbrella awnings , its decaying trash less of an obnoxious odor , minutely dulling the barbed wire and glass bottle fragments fastened onto the tops of walls around the property of the rich , and its rats that now refuse to scavenge openly and so are no longer scurry around the movements of feet .