He saw. He beheld a landscape, a tropical marshland, beneath a reeking sky, steaming, monstrous, rank - a kind of primeval wilderness - world of islands, morasses, and alluvial channels. [...] There were trees, mis-shapen as a dream, that dropped their naked roots straight through the air into the ground on into water that was stagnant and shadowy and glassy-green, where mammoth milk-white blossoms floated, and strange high-shouldered birds with curious bills stood gazing sideways without sound or stir.

Death in Venice, Thomas Mann