Cline translations As far as surprises go, this was certainly one.

Through the mist, what we suddenly stumbled across was so astonishing that at first we refused to believe it and then even when we were standing directly in front of it all, and as we were galley slaves to the core we started to have a good laugh, seeing that, right in front of us Can you imagine, their city was in front of us, absolutely straight. New York is an upright city. We had already seen cities, of course, and beautiful ones too, both ports and famous cities. But where we come from, the towns sleep, dont they, on the coast or on the shores of large rivers, they are spread out along the landscape, they wait for the traveller to arrive, whereas the American ones, they dont swoon, no, they hold themselves high, right there, not drooping at all, so straight that they are frightening. We then laughed until our bellies hurt. It was truly funny, a city built completely rigidly. But we could only laugh at the spectacle in our throats, due to the cold which blew off the sea during that time through a thick grey and pink mist, both brisk and biting so that it attacked our trousers and the crevices of the high fort, and the streets of the city, where the clouds were also weighed down with the heavy wind. Our galley kept to its narrow path right until it reached the swellings around the jetties, where just slimy water remained, all churned up by multitude of small skiffs and greedy, bastard tugs. For a tramp, it is never comfortable debarking at any point but for a galley slave it is even worse, especially as the Americans dont like galley slaves at all that come from Europe. They are all anarchists they say. They only want to receive the visitors who bring them cash, because all the currencies of Europe are offspring of the dollar.