'There it was, spread largely on both banks… an expanse of brown houses of bamboo, of mats, of leaves, of a vegetable-matter style of architecture, sprung out of the brown soil on the banks of the muddy river. Here and there in the distance, above the crowded mob of low, brown roof ridges, towered great piles of masonry, King’s Palaces, temples, gorgeous and dilapidated, crumbling under the vertical sunlight, tremendous, overpowering, almost palpable, which seemed to enter one’s breast with the breath of one’s nostrils and soak into one’s limbs through every pore of one’s skin.’
Bangkok by Joseph Conrad
