When one travels beyond a certain speed, there is nothing but
fatigue in looking out of a window, and this corridor train, twice
the width of its poor terrestrial brother, will have no need of that
distraction. The simple device of abandoning any but a few windows,
and those set high, gives the wall space of the long corridors to
books; the middle part of the train is indeed a comfortable library
with abundant armchairs and couches, each with its green-shaded
light, and soft carpets upon the soundproof floor. Further on will
be a news-room, with a noiseless but busy tape at one corner,
printing off messages from the wires by the wayside, and further
still, rooms for gossip and smoking, a billiard room, and the dining
car. Behind we shall come to bedrooms, bathrooms, the hairdresser,
and so forth.
"When shall we start?" I ask presently, as we return, rather like
bashful yokels, to the library, and the old gentleman reading the
Arabian Nights in the armchair in the corner glances up at me with a
sudden curiosity.
The botanist touches my arm and nods towards a pretty little
lead-paned window, through which we see a village sleeping under
cloudy moonlight go flashing by. Then a skylit lake, and then a
string of swaying lights, gone with the leap of a camera
shutter.
Two hundred miles an hour!
We resort to a dignified Chinese steward and secure our berths. It
is perhaps terrestrial of us that we do not think of reading the
Utopian literature that lines the middle part of the train. I
find a bed of the simple Utopian pattern, and lie for a time
thinking--quite tranquilly--of this marvellous adventure.
I wonder why it is that to lie securely in bed, with the light out,
seems ever the same place, wherever in space one may chance to be?
And asleep, there is no space for us at all. I become drowsy and
incoherent and metaphysical....
The faint and fluctuating drone of the wheels below the car,
re-echoed by the flying track, is more perceptible now, but it is
not unpleasantly loud, merely a faint tinting of the quiet....
No sea crossing breaks our journey; there is nothing to prevent a
Channel tunnel in that other planet; and I wake in London.
The train has been in London some time when I awake, for these
marvellous Utopians have discovered that it is not necessary to
bundle out passengers from a train in the small hours, simply
because they have arrived. A Utopian train is just a peculiar kind
of hotel corridor that flies about the earth while one sleeps.
Section 7
How will a great city of Utopia strike us?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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