So far as my small experience goes, the most wonderful arrival in the world is at Venice; but you should time it after dark.
Venice is so unlike anything else on earth that the first impact of it must be a marvelous experience at any hour; but after dark it is magical. You may have been reading books about Venice all your life; you may have seen innumerable pictures of the glories of the city; but no book and no picture can prepare you for the enchantment（n.魔法，魅力）of this arrival.
To step out of the glitter and bustle of the station----rather weary and jaded with the long journey from Milan----straight on to the landing stage（栈桥）against which the water of the Grand Canal is lapping, to step on board a gondola(n.狭长小船) and to go gliding down the dark, broad, silent highway, with dim-lit, ghostly palaces on either hand; not till memory forsakes you will you forget this experience.
The strange silence, broken only by the measured dip of the oar(n.桨) and the soft plashing（n.飞溅）of the water against your cleaving prow（n.船首）, and the occasional hoarse cries of the gondoliers as you pass another of these black, funeral barges(n.平底船); the few and feeble（adj.虚弱的）lamps, giving you momentary glimpses of balconies and finely carven arches; the sudden intensification of the silence and the darkness as you abruptly leave the Grand Canal and slip along one of the narrower waterways, always with tall houses on both sides of you, and above you a clear sky of stars, stars reflected tremblingly on the black waters----thousands of tourists must have tried to describe all this, but the magic and the mystery and the beauty of it defy (v.反抗，挑战) human speech.
And the spell is heightened by the consciousness that this is Venice; at the back of your mind is all that you have read about the strange history of this city, once the richest and most brilliant and most powerful in Europe, later fallen upon evil days of decay and subjection to a foreign power, now beginning to lift her head again as one of the great seaports of Italy.
