The roofs from above

An original descriptive passage set in an invented town.

From the high window, the town appeared to have agreed on red. Roof after roof carried the colour towards the hill, sometimes darkened by rain, sometimes bright as a newly broken brick. From the pavement, the buildings had been quarrelsome neighbours: a shop projecting its sign across another shop's doorway, a narrow house squeezed between broad ones, a delivery van concealing half a street. Up here, their differences lay under a common covering.

Yet the longer I looked, the less orderly the view became. A strip of shining metal patched one roof. Another had a shallow dip where the tiles seemed to have taken a breath. Chimneys rose in uneven groups, some capped, some open, one supporting an aerial bent towards the ground. Behind the grand stone front of the bank was a little wooden shed with a roof the colour of wet bread.

The rain began without announcing itself on the glass. I saw it first as a change in the nearest tiles: the red deepened, and the pale seams between them drew themselves more clearly. Water found the channels that the eye had overlooked. It gathered in a sagging gutter, hesitated at a joint and dropped in one thick rope into a yard. A person came out with a bucket, looked up and went back inside. From this height, the gesture was small; the overflowing gutter was not.

Beyond the roofs, the hill was becoming difficult to distinguish from the low cloud. The town's far edge dissolved while its nearest defects sharpened. I could no longer pretend that distance had made it simple. It had merely exchanged one set of details for another. When I returned to the pavement, I would see the bank's imposing doorway again. I would also know where its shed was hiding.

How does the writer develop the impression that viewing the town from above changes what can be noticed? Support your answer with references to the passage.