" Everywhere, the silt encroached, shoring itself in huge banks against a railway viaduct or crescent of offices, oozing through a submerged arcade like the fetid contents of some latter-day Cloaca Maxima. Many of the smaller lakes were now filled with the silt, yellow disks of fungus-covered sludge from which a profuse tangle of competing plant forms emerged, walled gardens in an insane Eden. "

― J.G. Ballard , The Drowned World