The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands

by Sarah Brooks

I was once a Godly man and full of certainties. This book must stand as a record of what I lost along the way, and as a guide for those who follow, in the hope that they may better bear the strange days of their journey, and sleep a little sounder through the uneasy nights.

There is a woman on the platform with a borrowed name. With steam in her eyes and the taste of oil on her lips.

Marya Petrovna is unafraid. Newborn. She can only go forward, following the porter as he disappears into the steam, broken by glimpses of green paint and gold lettering in English, as well as Russian and Chinese. The Trans-Siberian Express. Beijing–Moscow; Moscow–Beijing.

In front of her, a man with a beard and gold spectacles and the kind of voice that elbows all other voices out of the way, leans out of the window and shouts in English, “Where is the Station Master? Be careful with those boxes! Oh, I do beg your pardon.”

The train has not even departed yet and she has not followed the first piece of Rostov’s advice: Above all, do not attempt the journey unless you are certain of your own evenness of mind.

It is as busy and chaotic as the rest of the train, but at the far end of the carriage, set into the wall, is a little shrine containing an icon of Saint Mathilda and a statue of Yuan Guan. A saint and a god to watch over travellers, and over rail people, who, while putting their trust in mechanics, in wheels and gears and oil, are also inclined to think that it can’t do any harm to give polite recognition to the numinous, just in case.

And even though the First Class Cook states that the food in Third is not fit for street vermin, and even though Anya Kasharina maintains that the food in First wouldn’t fill up the belly of a gnat, the two cooks have been known to sit on the narrow benches in the Divide, sharing a pot of tea and a slow game of cards.

They speak in the dry, long-winded English of the Company, so that Weiwei has forgotten the beginning of their sentences before they get to the end.

“Don’t be fanciful,” she mutters. “Fanciful thoughts lead to dangerous thoughts,”

Isn’t that what everyone wanted? To not be forgotten. To be more than a line in a ledger, the sum total of your life adding up to little more than the strength you wasted to make other men rich.

The moon rises and the water turns to silver. It is hard not to think of the darkness beneath it, and what may be living there, in the depths where the light never shines. I advise the cautious traveller to limit the time they spend observing it.

It is said that so much had been taken from the land that it was always hungry. It had been feeding off the blood spilled by the empires, and by the bones of the animals and people they left behind. It gained a taste for death.

It gives him a shivery feeling at the base of his spine when he is doubtful and certain at the same time, and that is how he knows he is moving closer to God. “Meaning. Why must we think that an absence of order equates to an absence of meaning?

The part of her that is loyal and good feels a shiver of unease. The part that is conspiring to protect a stowaway lets out a sigh of relief.

Water pooling beneath her father’s face, grains of sand on his cheek. Where were they from? Cleaning it all away, before alerting the rest of the household, before letting herself think about what she was doing. Closing her father’s eyes so that no one would see the patterns within them, like cut glass, washed of color, as empty as the windows he had made.

Before I was anything, there were humans who were drawn to the water. When the land began to stir, they heard it calling. They changed. They started to talk in clicks and gasps. Their skin silvered and gills opened on their necks. They thrived.”

It was not enough to simply see through glass, he told her: “We have to see with it, use it to expand our vision, to make the train a travelling observatory.”

The Professor is silent. “Verum per vitrum videmus,” he says, eventually. “Through glass we see the truth,” echoes Marya. The motto of the St. Petersburg glassmakers’ guild.

The train must run. That is the only truth that matters. Not who is destroyed along the way.”

She doesn’t want to see, either. All around them is water, dripping from branches and leaves, pooling on the ground, catching the colors of the sky and the trees but other colors as well, ones which aren’t there and which her eyes don’t understand.

“When I found him … that morning … there was water on the desk, sand on his cheeks. And his eyes were open, colorless. As if they had turned to glass and the glass had turned back into water and sand. As if he had wept away all that was left of his work.”

but then your father came to me and told me that he had begun to see differently—prismatically, he called it. He said he could see too much, even without the scope. It was wonderful, he said. And unbearable.”

You will know us, of course. The train travels through myth, through the stories that have proliferated as fast as the seedlings that burst up through the paving stones of the cities. You will have seen us caught in the camera’s eye, pinned to the pages of the broadsheets or plunging through flickering light on a screen. You will have traced our path across the continents, stopped in your tracks at the sound of rails in the night, listened to all the tales told of us, not knowing what to believe.