It was a funny trip round Spain

It was a funny trip round Spain and through the Straits and up the French coast to Genoa. All the way there was a single file of camouflaged freighters, Greeks and Britishers and Norwegians and Americans, all hugging the coast and creeping along with life preservers piled on deck and boats swung out on the davits. Passing them was another line coming back light, transports and colliers from Italy and Saloniki, white hospital ships, every kind of old tub out of the seven seas, rusty freighters with their screws so far out of the water you could hear them a couple of hours after they were hull down and out of sight. Once they got into the Mediterranean there were French and British battleships to seaward all he time and silly looking destroyers with their long smokes smudges that would hail you and come aboard to see your papers Ashore it didn’t look like the war a bit. The weather was sunny after they passed Gibraltar. The Spanish coast was green with bare pink and yellow mountains back of the sore and all scattered with little white houses like lumps of sugar that bunched up here and there into towns. Crossing the gulf of Lyons in a drizzling rain and driving fog and nasty choppy sea,,, they came within an ace of running down a big felucca with barrels of wine. Then they were bowling along the French Riviera in a howling north west wind, with the red roofed towns all bright and shiny and the dry hills rising rocky behind them, and snow mountains standing out clear above. After they passed Monte Carlo it was a circus, the houses were all pink and blue and yellow and there were tall poplars and tall pointed church steeples in all the valleys.
From the book ‘U.S.A.’ by John Dos Passos