CHAPTER XXIX
MONOTONY
We left Lawrence late at night and went immediately to bed upon the train. When I awoke in the morning the car was standing still. In the ventilators overhead, I heard the steady monotonous whistling of the wind. As I became more awake I began to wonder where we were and why we were not moving. Presently I raised the window shade and looked out.
How many things there are in life which we think we know from hearsay, yet which, when we actually encounter them, burst upon us with a new and strange significance! I had believed, for example, that I realized the vastness of the United States without having actually traveled across the country, yet I had not realized it at all, and I do not believe that any one can possibly realize it without having felt it, in the course of a long journey. So too, with the interminable rolling desolation of the prairies, and the likeness of the prairies to the sea: I had imagined that I understood the prairies without having laid eyes upon them, but when I raised my window shade that morning, and found the prairies stretching out before me, I was as surprised, as stunned, as though I had never heard of them before, and the idea came to me like an original thought: How perfectly enormous they are! And how like the sea!
I had discovered for myself the truth of another platitude.
For a long time I lay comfortably in my berth, gazing out at the appalling spread of land and sky. Even at sea the great bowl of the sky had never looked so vast to me. The land was nothing to it. In the foreground there was nothing; in the middle distance, nothing; in the distance, nothing—nothing, nothing, nothing, met the eye in all that treeless waste of brown and gray which lay between the railroad line and the horizon, on which was discernible the faint outlines of several ships—ships which were in reality a house, a windmill and a barn.
Presently our craft—for I had the feeling that I was on a ship at anchor—got under way. On we sailed over the ocean of land for mile upon mile, each mile like the one before it and the one that followed, save only when we passed a little fleet of houses, like fishing boats at sea, or crossed an inconsequential wagon road, resembling the faintly discernible wake of some ship, long since out of sight.
Presently I arose and joining my companion, went to the dining car for breakfast. He too had fallen under the spell of the prairies. We sat over our meal and stared out of the window like a pair of images. After breakfast it was the same: we returned to our car and continued to gaze out at the eternal spaces. Later in the morning, we became restless and moved back to the observation car as men are driven by boredom from one room to another on an ocean liner.
Now and then in the distance we would see cattle like dots upon the plain, and once in a long time a horseman ambling along beneath the sky. The little towns were far apart and had, like the surrounding scenery, an air of sadness and of desolation. The few buildings were of primitive form, most of them one-story structures of wood, painted in raw color. But each little settlement had its wooden church, and each church its steeple—a steeple crude and pathetic in its expression of effort on the part of a poor little hamlet to embellish, more than any other house, the house of God.