The Tao of Travel

Not having been warned against this torture, we leave the windows open. We doze off and wake up covered with a grey crust and our mouths, ears, lungs, hair full of the ashes of the fire which surrounds our journey. This inferno with insignificant interruptions of douches of cold water which quickly turn into boiling water, and lumps of ice that melt and become hot water, was to be the only knowledge of India vouchsafed to Mr. Fogg and Passepartout...

Nothing stirs. Corn, paddy fields, mud village, agricultural labor of the damned souls in this hell. Turquoise blue and blackjays, occasional coconut palms and trees with fine luscious shadows begin to reappear. Sometimes a deodar stands alone in the desert dealing justice.

Stations. Shirts with tails hanging loose. Umbrellas. Workmen washing and massaging themselves with their fists. Then they stamp on their linen robes and wring them. And the never-ending procession of women beasts of burden. Blind men led by children. The heat is becoming less intolerable. By night it is almost cool. Tomorrow the inferno will be redoubled.

—

Mon Premier Voyage

(1937), published in English as

My Journey Around the World,

translated by W. J. Strachan (1959)

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT LEAVING HOME: "AT EVERY STATION I WAS ON THE POINT OF GETTING OFF"

From Nogent to Paris. What a ride! I closed the windows (I was alone in the compartment), held my handkerchief to my mouth, and wept. After a time, the sound of my own voice ... brought me to myself, then the sobs began again. At one point my head was spinning so that I was afraid. "Calm down! Calm down!" I opened the window; the moon, surrounded by a halo of mist, was shining in puddles; it was cold. I thought of my mother, her face all contracted from weeping, the droop at the corners of her mouth...

At Montereau I went into the station restaurant and drank three or four glasses of rum, not to try to forget things, but just to do something, anything.

Then my misery took another form: I thought of returning. (At every station I was on the point of getting off; only the fear of being a coward prevented me.) I imagined the voice of Eugenie, crying, "Madame! It's Monsieur Gustave!" I could give my mother this tremendous joy at once; it was up to me entirely. I lulled myself with this idea: I was exhausted, and it relaxed me.

—

Flaubert in Egypt,

translated by Francis Steegmuller (1972)

VLADIMIR NABOKOV IN 1909: "INFORMAL CONTACT BETWEEN TRAIN AND CITY"

When, on such journeys as these, the train changed its pace to a dignified amble and all but grazed house fronts and shop signs, as we passed through some big German town, I used to feel a two-fold excitement, which terminal stations could not provide. I saw a city with its toylike trams, linden trees, and brick walls enter the compartment, hobnob with the mirrors, and fill to the brim the windows on the corridor side. This informal contact between train and city was one part of the thrill. The other was putting myself in the place of some passerby who, I imagined, was moved as I would be moved myself to see the long, romantic, auburn cars, with their intervestibular connecting curtains as black as bat wings and their metal lettering copper-bright in the low sun, unhurriedly negotiate an iron bridge across an everyday thoroughfare and then turn, with all windows suddenly ablaze, around a last block of houses.

—"First Love,"

Nabokov's Dozen

(1958)

V. S. PRITCHETT: "LARGE THICK COLD OMELETS"

Usually I traveled second or third class on the Spanish trains, for there the Spanish crowd came in and were good company. Often the women traveled with a pet bird in a cage: everyone took their shoes off and when they unpacked their large thick cold omelets, they were careful to offer it first to everyone in the carriage. At the stations, which were often a couple of miles from the towns they served, water sellers calling out "Agua fresca" walked up and down in the red dust of the south and the pale dust of Castile.

—

The Spanish Temper

(1954)

EVELYN WAUGH ON THE TRAIN TO NAIROBI: "MY ILL TEMPER GRADUALLY COOLED"

But my ill temper gradually cooled as the train, with periodic derailments (three, to be exact, between Mombassa and Nairobi), climbed up from the coast into the highlands. In the restaurant car that evening I sat opposite a young lady who was on her way to be married. She told me that she had worked for two years in Scotland Yard and that had coarsened her mind; but since then she had refined it again in a bank at Dar-es-Salaam. She was glad to be getting married as it was impossible to obtain fresh butter in Dar-es-Salaam.