Explore "Blue Hand" by Edgar Wallace on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
JIM loved London, the noise and the smell of it. He loved its gentle thunders, its ineradicable good-humour, its sublime muddle. Paris depressed him, with its air of gaiety and the underlying fierceness of life's struggle. There was no rest in the soul of Paris. It was a city of strenuous bargaining, of ruthless exploitation. Brussels was a dumpy undergrown Paris, Berlin a stucco Gomorrah, Madrid an extinct crater beneath which a new volcanic stream was seeking a vent.
New York he loved, a city of steel and concrete teeming with sentimentalists posing as tyrants. There was nothing quite like New York in the world. Dante in his most prodigal mood might have dreamt New York and da Vinci might have planned it, but only the high gods could have materialized the dream or built to the master's plan. But London was London--incomparable, beautiful. It was the history of the world and the mark of civilization. He made a detour and passed through Covent Garden.