The Train From Rhodesia

While the story focuses on a train stopped in a station, it conveys a sense of movement and volatility. The train is still, but the narrator’s perspective is roving and restless. We move back and forth between the passengers on the train, the vendors in the train station, and the stationmaster and his family. Random, unexplained figures appear: a man who walks the length of the train to chat with the conductor, and a woman standing in her yard who looks up at the sound of the train’s departure.

This swirling perspective creates a sense of dislocation and strangeness. The passengers are unsettled in one way, being mostly (we assume) wealthy Westerners on vacation, while the native characters are unsettled in another way by their poverty and isolation. The landscape is a remote desert, giving the sense of a place where it is literally impossible to put down roots. The sand that the stationmaster’s children run through erases even their footprints: “[T]he sand, that lapped all around, from sky to sky, cast little rhythmical cups of shadow, so that the sand became the sea, and closed over the children’s black feet softly and without imprint” (43).

The story makes ample use of metaphor so that identities seem fluid and unfixed. The sand is compared to the sea, while the language used to describe the train evokes a giant, clumsy beast: “Creaking, jerking, jostling, gasping, the train filled the station” (43). A carved lion is described as a creature less inanimate than silenced, with its mouth “opened in an endless roar too terrible to be heard” (44). The passengers who remain in their cabins are also silenced and muffled, in a way that recalls captive animals: “caged faces, boxed in, cut off after the contact of outside” (44).

The newlyweds on the train could be called the main characters as their misunderstanding about the lion is the story’s principal conflict. Yet their story is continually interrupted and overwhelmed by the setting—descriptions of the train station and the life around it. The couple’s unhappiness seems both trivial and resonant. In her loneliness, the wife reflects the barrenness of the landscape. Her feeling of shame is compared to sand, evoking the sand of the desert: “The heat of shame mounted through her legs and body and sounded in her ears like the sound of sand pouring” (47).