GR translation: with blue shadows to seal its passage

[Paul Mackin]

On 12/7/2011 2:18 AM, Mike Jing wrote:
> I am going over Part 1 again from the beginning, making changes.  So
> here are questions I was afraid to ask earlier.
>
> P4.1-10   —they go in under archways, secret entrances of rotted
> concrete that only looked like loops of an underpass . . . certain
> trestles of blackened wood have moved slowly by overhead, and the
> smells begun of coal from days far to the past, smells of naphtha
> winters, of Sundays when no traffic came through, of the coral-like
> and mysteriously vital growth, around the blind curves
> and out the lonely spurs, a sour smell of rolling-stock absence, of
> maturing rust, developing through those emptying days brilliant and
> deep, especially at dawn, with blue shadows to seal its passage, to
> try to bring events to Absolute Zero . . .
>
> What is this "coral-like and mysteriously vital growth"?
>
> What is "developing through those emptying days brilliant and deep"?
> Is it the rust?  Why are the days "emptying", and yet "brilliant and
> deep"?
>
> "with blue shadows to seal its passage"  Whose passage?  And what is
> trying to "bring events to Absolute Zero"?
>
I get the impression the infrastructure used to transport the poor 
preterite souls about the city is  long abandoned, on its last legs, in 
a state of final decay, as near to death (0 absolute) as the poor souls 
themselves, trotted out from disuse for this special wartime purpose.

The vital growth is parasitic, what you find on the hull of a ship long 
in the water.

Emptying days are passing days.

"It" is the process of decay, abandonment, being passed over, damnation.

An addition to Michael's contribution.

P