9. Describe an English journalist's impressions of travelling through the vast spaces of Russia, China and Mongolia (Section VI, «The Trans-Siberian Express»).

It’s no wonder that trains are a literary genre all on their own. Writers from Graham Green to Agatha Christie realized that there is nothing quite like curtain sleeping compartments quicken the narrative pulse. To board the train that crosses countries and continents is to feel that anything might happened.

From the first days of a journey on board a Trans-Siberian Express the journalist was fascinated by the changing countryside, by his first-class compartment which had the air of a slightly down-at-heel gentlemen’s club. The scale of the Trans-Siberian, the largest and the longest of rail journeys in the world, it difficult to comprehend.

Food in the dining car was adequate, if uninspired. But the best food was to be found at the stations where the train made scheduled stops, where were veritable bazaars with home-made dishes.

The towns they passed, indistinguishable from one another, were a blur of smoking chimneys and grey apartment block. They rattled across wide rivers and climbed into the Urals. But the very ease of the journey began to betray the journalist. He read, slept, ate and began to forget who he was.

Then they crossed into Mongolia. For miles they saw nothing, then 2 or 3 yurts, a herb of horses grazing in a water meadows, a woman tending a flock of black goats.

In the Gobidesert the grass grew sparser. Like Mongolia, Chine offered them a timeless landscape. But in China everything was man-made, every tree a planted one, every inch of land cultivated. At Peking they came to a half and emerged blinking into the real word again. For all the enticements of China the journalist was said to leave the train. For a week it had been home, secure and familiar.

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