Among these red pieces of day (against which--and quite silently--hills made of blue and green paper, scorch-bending themselves, upcurve into anguish, climbing spiral, and disappear), satanic and blasé, a black goat lookingly wanders. There is nothing left of the world; but into this nothing “il trene per Roma signori?” jerkily rushes. ‘Red pieces of day’ suggests sunset fragments--the disintegration of the universe as the train moves toward night. The hills become as unreal as blue and green paper. The rocking of the train seems to give their rounded outlines, as they stream past, the sort of movement a long strip of paper makes when it curls up in the heat of fire, or that the pen makes when it writes u’s and e’s in copperplate handwriting. As the train comes close up to the hills their rounded outlines seem to spiral upward against the red pieces (‘into anguish’) because the eye strains itself looking up at them: they can only just be seen by pressing the face against the window, and as the train gets nearer still, they are no more visible. The eye is forced to drop to the foreground and there exchanges glances with a diabolic-looking goat. The traveller is utterly confused by these perceptual experiences: when the line of hills that he has been watching is snatched away from his eyes it seems like the end of the world, like death, and the goat seems like the Devil greeting the dead. He pulls himself together. “Where am I?” The movement of rocking and jerking continues. He remembers the last words he has heard spoken, the question “The Rome train, gentlemen?” which is all that he can think of to account for the motion.