Tim Bray wrote:
>
>
> Well, thank you very much, it's not that many days have an unexpected
> little piece of EP beauty land in their middle.  Weirdly enough, I found
> myself striving clumsily for an eerily almost-identical word-picture in
> March of this year (different city though): check out the last para in
> http://tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/03/18/Cities


One paragraph from that web site:

One time when I was a kid - this would be the early Sixties - my family
was flying from a vacation on Cyprus to Beirut, Lebanon, where we lived.
I had the window seat and after we'd been flying for a while was kind of
puzzled; it was clear but I couldn't see the Lebanese coastline. It
turns out that the city was having a power failure - not that uncommon
in that region at that time - and in an instant blazed into life beneath
me, an endless carpet of light, light in squares but not all squares,
white but not all white, outlining the mountains and seashore and me
knowing that a hundred thousand eyes were welcoming the light back. Hey,
that's my species, we built that.
----

The cities that seem to me most beautiful to fly into at night are those
that are built on mountainsides (or at least  with steep hills). The two
I have particularly in mind are Pittsburgh and San Francisco. Some
smaller cities built on hills are also impressive from the highway at
the right distance over the right terrain (at night that is).

Carrol