54 great opening lines: 39

It was a dejected-looking little tropical town situate some forty miles or more up a hot muddy river that wound back and forward, and back again, and round about as no river ever wound and serpentined before.

The Deeply Poetic Account of a Midsummer Night’s Idyll, James Edmond

*****

By the time I reached the last word of this opening line I was already rapt.  It’s an indication of my taste in literature that this line resembles the one I posted yesterday, the opener from John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.  Yet they were decades and continents apart, these two authors:  the Scottish-Australian James Edmond published his story in 1913 (in his collection A Journalist and Two Bears) and the American Steinbeck published his in 1937.