It may be New Yorker style but it’s also the style of a lot of pre-1950 travel writing. Travel writing at the time assumed that the reader would never visit the

It may be New Yorker style but it’s also the style of a lot of pre-1950 travel writing. Travel writing at the time assumed that the reader would never visit the destination being written about, or for that matter any other destinations farther than a few hundred miles from home, so a lot of that older travel writing is infused with myth, simile, and prose which would today seem florid.