Paul Theroux - The Tao of Travel - Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

The train arrived at Ayudhya. I was content to satisfy my curiosity about this historic place by a view of the railway station (after all, if a man of science can reconstruct a prehistoric animal from its thigh bone why cannot a writer get as many emotions as he wants from a railway station? In the Pennsylvania Depot is all the mystery of New York and in Victoria Station the grim, weary vastness of London).

— The Gentleman in the Parlour (1930)

PAUL MORAND ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS: PARIS TO CONSTANTINOPLE IN TWO PARAGRAPHS

The Simplon-Orient dragged its triweekly public through the gloom as usual. The usual French dressmakers and, less elderly, milliners were returning to Constantinople with a new lot of models; at La-roche the perfume of Paris began to fade and the tenacious Oriental odors, rose and peppery bergamot, reasserted themselves. Officials' wives flitted in the corridors with six infant children who wouldn't be properly put to bed this side of Bombay. Officers of the Etat-major, in police caps, strode up the station platforms during the stops, stretching their short, authoritative legs. French hearts are wholly hidden by the multitude of their decorations. The English slept late, whistled in the conveniences, where they stayed in relays until the water and towels ran out. The Israelite-Spanish families from Salonika, returning after clarifying their complexions at Vichy, kept to their bunks all day with their clothes on, stretched on the unmade bedding, between swaying flasks of Chianti hung from the electric light fixtures. Then after a tedium they and the rest of us slept to the rattle of the axles and the steel castanet springs. Snores. We beat on the mahogany panels to drive back the bedbugs. The conductor snoozed at the end of the corridor, on a cushion stuffed with contraband lire, dinars, drachmas, Rumanian leis and pounds, his alpaca tunic stuffed also with little folded papers full of jewels.

The train shook the loose glass of Gothic Swiss railway stations. For twenty-nine minutes the Simplon offered its large iron symphony. Then the banked roads and rice fields of the Piedmont. Then a station leading off into nothing, a great cistern of silence and shadows that was Venice. In the morning a zinc-colored north wind overbent the Croatian corn in the plains. Pigs, striped black and white as with racing colors, betrayed the presence of Serbia; they were apparently devouring the corpse, or rather the wheels and an alarm signal, of a car which lay still derailed in a ditch. After rivers came yet other rivers that we crossed on rickety trestles beside the ruined piers of older bridges which had been destroyed in retreats. At Vinkovci we got rid of the velvet Rumanians, velvet eyes, velvet mustaches, daughters in undershirts plaiting their hair in the gelid darkness by the glimmer of half-frozen candles. After Sofia, pimentos hung drying across the house fronts. Oriental sun beat upon the Bulgar plains, ox-ploughs obtruded a symbolic prosperity as depicted upon the Bulgars' postage stamps and their money. At last, after the desert of Thrace, under a sky full of constellations lacking a polestar, with the disfigured Bear no longer recognizable at the low edge of the horizon, the Sea of Marmara stretched before us through a breach in the Byzantine wall.

— "Turkish Night," Fancy Goods — Open All Night (1922), translated by Ezra Pound

REBECCA WEST EN ROUTE TO YUGOSLAVIA

I raised myself on my elbow and called [to my husband] through the open door into the other wagon-lit: "My dear, I know I have inconvenienced you terribly by making you take your holiday now, and I know you did not really want to come to Yugoslavia at all. But when you get there you will see why it was so important that we should make this journey, and that we should make it now, at Easter. It will all be quite clear, once we are in Yugoslavia."

There was, however, no reply. My husband had gone to sleep. It was perhaps as well. I could not have gone on to justify my certainty that this train was taking us to a land where everything was comprehensible, where the mode of life was so honest that it put an end to perplexity.

— Black Lamb and Gray Falcon (1941)

JEAN COCTEAU SUFFERING FROM BOMBAY TO CALCUTTA

Intolerable porters demand additional tips. Passepartout [Cocteau's lover, Marcel Khill] threatens them. They run off but return and glue their faces at the windows of the dining car, where one can just manage to collapse — it's the only word — into the seats one each side of the table.

I had no idea that such heat existed and that people could live in this cursed zone. The train starts off, and as we move out, I can recognize the old cannons on which Kim sat astride at the beginning of the book. [The cannon, Zamzama, was actually in Lahore, but this is a detail.]

The fire in India burns the glass, metal and coachwork to a white heat, raises the temperature of the atmosphere till you feel sick despite the electric fans which whip up its sticky paste.

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.