Read the paragraph from “Rivers and Stories,” Part 1. Traveling in the world, even now, we confront, one way or another, the human history of rivers. Several times in the last few years I’ve arrived in a foreign city, and gone to sleep in a hotel room, and awakened to look out the window at a river. The first time was in Budapest. The river was the Danube. I woke up just before sunrise, walked out onto a balcony, and in the cold air at first light, looked out across the Pest hills and the first glimmerings of day on the broad, mud-colored water. The smell of it was in the air. I realized that I didn’t know much of its geography. I knew that it originated somewhere in the Alps, flowed east across southern Germany—the Nibelungenleid consists of Danube river tales—and south from Vienna through Hungary and then southeast again through Serbia, emptying into the Black Sea somewhere south of Odessa.
What rhetorical device does the author use in this paragraph?