Write it to Understand it

"All golden and lovely it blazed in the sunset, with walls, temples, colonnades, and arched bridges of veined marble, silver basined fountains of prismatic spray in broad squares and perfumed gardens, and wide streets marching between delicate trees and blossom-laden urns and ivory statues in gleaming rows; while on steep northward slopes climbed tiers of red roofs and old peaked gables harbouring little lanes of grassy cobbles."

From H.P. Lovecraft in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.

You lose your breath reading it, don't you? This excerpt is somewhat unusual to Lovecraft's usual writing style. In other pieces, like "The Call of Cthulhu," Lovecraft enjoys giving the reader description that only hints to what he's depicting; one of the best terms from "Cthulhu" is "non-Euclidean," or in otherwords, un-geometric. But this--- wow.

This is the scene that Lovecraft's lead is captivated by in dreams. It's the third time he's seen it. Reading this quickly is impossible. It's labryrnthine in it's structure, only by writing it did I fully understand what Lovecraft was describing. In a quick read, you wouldn't notice at first that the first part of this sentence was list of just three: the marble of the city, its fountains, and streets; and that this is the immediate surroundings. After the semicolon, he presents the deep background, which the mind's eye paints hazily, using an obscure technique called "Atmospheric Perspective."

In doing this, Lovecraft forces the reader to step into this setting, to walk it a bit, and smell its air before continuing, thus creating a vivid model in the mind for the following story. But if you don't stop to explore what happens next, you'll find yourself confused, lost in the geography.