A surprising image, as if the sun itself were cast in Vulcan’s smithy, a great sizzling shield of liquified iron.
‘Everything passes; but there is no forgetting this huge, cast-iron sun shining through the evening mist, this bitter wind laden with the scent of wormwood…’
Source: Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman; trans. Robert Chandler (New York: New York Review Books, 2006 (1985)), p. 292
