Ghostly fires and Phantom Flames

Over this great spiritual city of past earth-lives hang patches of light of a dim misty appearance like faintly luminous smoke, steel grey in colour. 

This is the light thrown off from the powerful intellects of the inhabitants whose souls are degraded, but not undeveloped, and whose intellects are of a high order, but devoted to base things, so that the true soul light is wanting, and this strange reflection of its intellectual powers alone remains. 

In other parts of the city the atmosphere itself seems on fire. 

Flames hang in the air and flicker from place to place like ghostly fires whose fuel has turned to ashes before the flames have burned out.  

As the floating phantom flames are swept to and fro by the currents of the air, Spirit Franchezzo sees groups of dark spirits passing up and down the streets heedless or perhaps unconscious of these spectral flames that they throw into the atmosphere and which their own fierce passions create and which hang around them as spiritual flames.

As he looks and gazes on this strange city of dead and ruined souls, a strange wave of feeling sweeps over him, for, in its crumbling walls―its disused buildings, he can trace a resemblance to the one city on earth with which he is most familiar and which is dear to his heart. 

He calls aloud to his companion, Faithful Friend, to ask what this means―

Is it the past or the future or the present of his beloved city?

It is all three. 

This is the doom that awaits so many―the precipice over which many have fallen in all the pride and glory and lust of sin.