Journey of discovery
K.R. VAIDYANATHAN
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Travel by train to experience facets of life as yet unseen and unknown.
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Photo: Johney Thomas
FlAshing past: A different life. .
Nothing compares to sitting by a train window and looking out. Common enough sights, but at high speed, they look wonderful and magical.
Images of beauty
Who is not fascinated by the rhythmic beat of train’s motion, the undulating cadence of the whistle and sight of the landscape fleeing past. Muriel Dale, a tourist, says, “Here is a string of women in red shawls against golden sunlit grass above a strip of blue water, and there again a man just stopped work sitting at the door of a dusty hut of palm leaves and dry clay. He shades his eyes with his hand as he watches the train pass. Then a group of children bathing and paddling, at this distance they are lovely. Again there are people, men and women, stacking corn or hay round a homestead.” As the train rushes past blue hills and shining waterfalls, through cold dark tunnels and valleys, rich with all its shades of green you are filled with wonder at the panorama that unfolds before you in all its splendour.
The skill and ingenuity of those early engineers in laying the track through those impregnable rocks and impenetrable jungles is admirable.
Along the tracks are wild flowers, creepers and ‘thorns with little violet flowers or of orange vermillion’. We pass villages with baked mud huts. Sometimes the trains pass so close that we can see into the huts.
Even the telephone wires with birds perched on them, dipping and swaying as the train rushes past look enchanting.
As evening falls, we pass herds of cattle being hurried home. Little fires begin to glow inside the huts. And in the distance the city lights begin to appear rising and twinkling in the gathering dark.
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