The Train From Rhodesia

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1952

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Symbols & Motifs

Sand

This story takes place in the desert, and sand is invoked in a way that is both literal and metaphorical. Sand is inhospitable to roots and growth but is also soft and embracing. One can run through sand in bare feet, as the village children do at the beginning of the story; at the same time, the sand covers their tracks as soon as they have been made. The story compares the desert to the ocean in its combination of resistance and softness: “[The sand] lapped all around, from sky to sky, cast little rhythmical cups of shadow, so that the sand became the sea” (43).

At the end of the story, the disillusioned wife on the train experiences her despair as “the sound of sand pouring” (47). The sense is that she is being buried alive so that the sand’s softness is ultimately a form of brutality. Her shame has to do with a sense of herself as a creature of privilege, on the winning side of an unfair class struggle. The sand can be seen as a metaphor for the barren capitalist society of which she is a part.

The Train

The train in this story is depicted as both powerful and clumsy. It seems to come out of nowhere, like a vision in the desert. At the same time, its entry into the station is awkward and suggests a domesticated beast: “Creaking, jerking, jostling, gasping, the train filled the station” (43). Its whistle is described, at the story’s beginning and end, as “calling out to the sky,” a phrase that further suggests an animal—a lost and lonely one—more than a machine (43).

The train is invested with more emotion than many of its passengers, who are depicted as nearly robotic. The passengers who remain in their cabins appear as “caged faces, boxed in, cut off,” while the passengers who engage with the villagers are relentlessly demanding in their dealings with them (44). The effect is to depict a chaotic modern society in which human interaction becomes as mechanical as the machines that dominate their lives.

Carved Animals

The carved animals that the village vendors sell are souvenirs for the train passengers; at the same time, the newlywed wife on the train is not sure what she will do with these souvenirs once she is home: “But the wooden buck, the hippos, the elephants […]! How will they look at home?” (45) Something about the animals resists assimilation and capture as if they are live animals rather than ornaments. Like the vendors, the animals can never be fully known by the train passengers; they can only be bought.

The wife is drawn to the carved lion in part because she intuits its hidden life. It has been carved with craft and ingenuity, suggesting a more deliberate, thoughtful culture than her own; at the same time, its mouth is open in “an endless roar too terrible to be heard,” suggesting a silent protest (44). She has respect for both its force and delicacy and is shocked when her husband treats it as a mere trophy. It is as if the lion were alive to her, and her husband has carelessly killed it.