... As though you were in a world peopled by legends, jinn-maidens, and fables ... the vast imagination of the East, which the modern West makes real in a reality that is like imagination, or beyond imagination ...
And as though the world were spinning you round in enchanted spirals, as you read this article by the man of letters Mr. Kamal al-Yaziji on what he saw in the land of wonders and marvels ... "The Editors"
The traditional understanding of "the New World" is that it is the world newly discovered — the world of Columbus. Yet whoever has had the good fortune to visit those lands, and gives himself over to contemplating their new civilization in general, and their mechanical innovations in particular, is struck at once by the thought that the name has acquired, across the ages, a truer meaning: that it is a world of a new civilization.
The visitor arrives in New York City and is seized by its towering buildings, its suspended bridges, its elevated roads. He marvels at the tunnels that burrow beneath the earth, and at the tube-roads that carpet the riverbeds and
take the waters for their blanket. He is astonished at the mechanical inventions that ease labor, spare effort, and save a great deal of time.
Indeed it seems to the visitor, in the flood of his amazement, that he is in a city planned by Solomon the Wise and built by a company of jinn, or that its designer drew his imagination from the book of the Thousand and One Nights. For wherever he turns he sees enduring signs of that splendid imagination, and wherever he faces he beholds its wonders in solid form: the castles standing in the air, the gliding flying carpet, the enchanted secret doors, the marvelous cap of invisibility, and the astounding ring of "At Your Service" — all of these the visitor sees with his own
eyes and touches with his own hand.
The Castles in the Air:
These are what are known as skyscrapers. The tallest of them exceed a hundred stories, many reach sixty and seventy, and few among them fall below fifty. Whoever looks out from their lofty windows on a cloudy day imagines himself in a palace whose foundations rest upon the clouds and whose summits pierce the very heart of the sky; and perhaps seconds pass over him in which he does not doubt that he is in one of the palaces of the "Thousand and One Nights."
The Flying Carpet:
It appears in many signs, among them: the bridges suspended above the broad rivers, and the roads raised upon columns, threading their way among the huge buildings. Among them too are the stairways that move upward and downward, and the elevators that stitch together dozens of stories, rising and descending. Of this kind also are the belts that glide among the various work departments in the great factories, carrying the goods still in the making from one worker to another, so that each may perform on them his own particular task; and so on until they reach the packing department. If the observer were to set aside the scientific, mechanical side of it, he would see in all of these the flying carpet, gliding in every direction.
The Enchanted Doors:
Of this kind are the cross-set arms that bar the passageways leading to the stations of the