The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands

by Sarah Brooks

His stomach twinges again but it is the sharp, almost pleasurable pain of expectation. It is the pain he feels when he is on the cusp of a discovery, when an idea is dancing tantalizingly within reach, or when he has found, beneath a rock or within a stream, some new and marvelous creature whose meaning he does not yet understand. A sudden hearty laugh interrupts his reverie, and a young couple enter the carriage, speaking French. Of the man, he gains only a faintly disagreeable impression of too much hair and too many teeth, but the lady has a pale and delicate kind of beauty. He nods stiffly to them and turns back to the window. He is ill at ease in the company of fellow travellers and has no wish to cultivate new acquaintances. He has met many such travellers in the course of his journeys, at those hotels and inns in which European languages are spoken and the food—while a thin imitation of proper nourishment—can be eaten with familiar utensils. He has suffered too many tedious evenings, amazed at how they can speak so long about so little. Though they could be among the grandest of mountains or cities, their horizons remain barely wider than the walls of their own estates.