The train went slowly, with frequent stoppages, often in wild country far from any railway station, where in such surroundings its existence seemed utterly improbable. Occasionally small bands of comitadjis would ride up and menace theatrically the dejected Serbian prisoners who were being moved into Bulgaria. There was a cold wind, and snow was lying thinly on the hills.
In the rapid dusk Michael fell asleep; soon after, the train seemed to have stopped for the night. Sylvia did not wake him up, but sat for two hours by the light of one candle stuck upon her valise and pored upon the moonless night that pressed against the window-panes of the compartment with scarcely endurable desolation. There was no sound of those murmurous voices that make mysterious even suburban tunnels when trains wait in them on foggy nights. The windows were screwed up; the door into the corridor was locked; in the darkness and silence Sylvia felt for the first time in all its force the meaning of imprisonment. Suddenly a flaring torch carried swiftly along the permanent way threw shadowy grotesques upon the ceiling of the compartment, and Michael, waking up with a start, asked their whereabouts.
"Somewhere near Zaribrod, as far as I can make out, but it's impossible to tell for certain. I can't think what they're doing. We've been here for two hours without moving, and I can't hear a sound except the wind. It was somebody's carrying a torch past the window that woke you up."
They speculated idly for a while on the cause of the delay, and then gradually under the depression of the silence their voices died away into occasional sighs of impatience.
"What about eating?" Sylvia suggested at last. "I'm not hungry, but it will give us something to do."
So they struggled with tinned foods, glad of the life that the fussy movement gave to the compartment.
"One feels that moments such as these should be devoted to the most intimate confidences," Michael said, when they had finished their dinner and were once more enmeshed by the silence.
"There's a sort of portentousness about them, you mean?"
"Yes, but as a matter of fact, one can't even talk about commonplace things, because one is all the time fidgeting with the silence."
"I know," Sylvia agreed. "One gets a hint of madness in the way one's personality seems to shrink to nothing. I suppose there really is somebody left alive in the world? I'm beginning to feel as if it were just you and I against the universe."