Description of our city

Here is a description of our city by an Englishman who does not think so much of our city.

"... a sight so extraordinary in this landscape of [emptiness and] freedom that you could not help but doubt the veracity of your vision for a moment. It was a city. A great, huge, ugly scar of a place belching smoke from power-station stacks, overhung with a yellow-brown haze of smog through which a few small skyscrapers were visible. It snaked its way along a wide valley between high ranges like some sluggish, diseased serpent—repellent, yet somehow intriguing. What was a city like that—industrial, polluted, vast—doing here?"

Not I need to be clear that this is not how I would describe the city. But for someone who is coming over the empty, fenceless plains of Mongolia the city certainly seems to rise out of the nowhere, an incongruous urban conglomeration in a the midst of an ocean of grassy, rolling hills.