What is "black as coal"

Usage examples of "black as coal".

But this beach was black as coal, not golden, and the sky was black too, not washed-out blue, and she was a long way from Florida.

The suit looked as if it had once been as black as coal, but now it was badly charred, the surface flaking off, so as the figure spun it gave off a shower of scorched flakes like a firework.

Paul's hair, black as coal, was streaked with firn-lines of glacial white.

Through the town they wandered, through the crooked streets, toward the glassy canal where the water lay black as coal.

Most nights in the Terry were black as pitch, black as coal, blacker than the residents.

Within a dozen paces, the pristine snow turned to soggy peat, and the albino oaks gave way to the shadowy depths of a petrified forest The trees were as black as coal, with ebony limbs that ended in jagged stumps and twisted trunks propped against each other at every odd angle.

All the monuments of the city seemed to be bathed in yellow-gold floodlights: the Castle on its shapeless volcanic mound, the Balmoral Hotel, and the memorial for Walter Scott which looked, Henry thought, like a Saturn V launch gantry rendered in sandstone, turned black as coal by pollution, which the monument was too fragile to have washed off.

It was enormous, black as coal, with dark golden rings around its abdomen.