With tolerable distinctness he remembered the sights he had seen, and fragments of conversation--then another departure, still southward, the crossing of the Alps, Italy, Venice--a dream of water and sun and beautiful buildings, in which the varied conversational powers of his companion found constant material.

As a matter of fact the conversation was what was most clearly impressed upon Kafka's mind, as he recalled the rapid passage from one city to another, and realised how many places he had visited in one short month.

From Venice southwards, again, Florence, Rome, Naples, Sicily, by sea to Athens and on to Constantinople, familiar to him already from former visits--up the Bosphorus, by the Black Sea to Varna, and then, again, a long period of restful sleep during the endless railway journey--Pesth, Vienna, rapidly revisited and back at last to Prague, to the cold and the gray snow and the black sky.

It was not strange, he thought, that his recollections of so many cities should be a little confused.

A man would need a fine memory to catalogue the myriad sights which such a trip offers to the eye, the innumerable sounds, familiar and unfamiliar, which strike the ear, the countless sensations of comfort, discomfort, pleasure, annoyance and admiration, which occupy the nerves without intermission.
There was something not wholly disagreeable in the hazy character of the retrospect, especially to a nature such as Kafka's, full of undeveloped artistic instincts and of a passionate love of all sensuous beauty, animate and inanimate.