Grimness

The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness—a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility.

This one was almost featureless, as if still in the making, with an aspect of monotonous grimness.

This is a good example of Huxley's method of setting off against each other the frivolities of the artificial world and the grimnesses of the real one […]