The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims' Progress • Paragraph 1475
Stage 1 of 6

Read it through once

But may be you can not see the wild extravagance of my panorama. You could if you were here. Here, you feel all the time just as if you were living about the year 1200 before Christ--or back to the patriarchs--or forward to the New Era. The scenery of the Bible is about you--the customs of the patriarchs are around you--the same people, in the same flowing robes, and in sandals, cross your path--the same long trains of stately camels go and come--the same impressive religious solemnity and silence rest upon the desert and the mountains that were upon them in the remote ages of antiquity, and behold, intruding upon a scene like this, comes this fantastic mob of green-spectacled Yanks, with their flapping elbows and bobbing umbrellas! It is Daniel in the lion's den with a green cotton umbrella under his arm, all over again.