With their souls of patent leather, they come down the road. Hunched and nocturnal, where they breathe they impose, silence of dark rubber, and fear of fine sand.

The imagery suggests an ominous, dehumanized force advancing—figures with “souls of patent leather,” a metaphor for hard, glossy, manufactured feeling: moral rigidity, bourgeois respectability, or institutional authority that has replaced living conscience. Their “hunched and nocturnal” posture evokes predation and secrecy, while “silence of dark rubber” implies muffled, stealthy movement—power that operates without open speech or accountability. The closing “fear of fine sand” conveys a pervasive, granular dread that gets everywhere, like dust, and hints at fragility beneath the apparent hardness: sand can clog, erode, and bury. Overall, the passage reads as Lorca’s surreal indictment of oppressive modernity—an approach of faceless agents whose presence imposes silence and fear.