*Title: At the End of the Passage by Rudyard Kipling
Date Read: 17 October 2009
Available Online?: YES
Briefly: The story concerns four men with lonely posts on the Indian railway who meet up once a week for card playing and company. Through lack of sleep, and the fear that he is being chased by a faceless pursuer, one of the men is gradually going insane.
Afterthoughts: Sadly I found this to be a very difficult story to read. It’s language, it’s lack of character establishment and a real failure to engage me to any great depth, all left me feeling greatly underwhelmed. The story’s highlight is its exploration of the concept that the retina records the last image that a dying person sees – a belief which was highly popular for a period during the nineteenth-century, but aside from this – very disappointing.
Notable Quote: The four, stripped to the thinnest of sleeping-suits, played whist crossly, with wranglings as to leads and returns. It was not the best kind of whist, but they had taken some trouble to arrive at it. Mottram of the Indian Survey had ridden thirty and railed one hundred miles from his lonely post in the desert since the night before; Lowndes of the Civil Service, on special duty in the political department, had come as far to escape for an instant the miserable intrigues of an impoverished native State whose king alternately fawned and blustered for more money from the pitiful revenues contributed by hard-wrung peasants and despairing camel-breeders; Spurstow, the doctor of the line, had left a cholera-stricken camp of coolies to look after itself for forty-eight hours while he associated with white men once more. Hummil, the assistant engineer, was the host. He stood fast and received his friends thus every Sunday if they could come in. When one of them failed to appear, he would send a telegram to his last address, in order that he might know whether the defaulter were dead or alive. There are very many places in the East where it is not good or kind to let your acquaintances drop out of sight even for one short week.
Rating: 
*Story read as part of my 31 Shots of Shock reading challenge.Four men
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