sudden stopping of the train. It was in Italy. A man in the carriage
said to me that there was some sort of accident and that we should be
waiting a while. The people got out and walked about by the side of the
track. I also got out of the carriage and took the air, and when I so
stepped out into the cool of that summer evening I was amazed at the
loneliness and tragedy of the place.

There were no houses about me that I could see save one little place
built for the railway men. There was no cultivation either.

Close before me began a sort of swamp with reeds which hardly moved to
the air, and this gradually merged into a sheet of water above and
beyond which were hills, barren and not very high, which took the last
of the daylight, for they looked both southward and to the west. The
more I watched the extraordinary and absolute scene the less I heard of
the low voices about me, and indeed a sort of positive silence seemed to
clothe the darkening landscape. It was full of something quite gone
down, and one had the impression that it would never be disturbed.

As the light lessened, the hills darkened, the sky took on one broad and
tender colour, the sheet of water gleamed quite white, and the reeds
stood up like solid shadows against it. I wish I could express in words
the impression of recollection and of savage mourning which all that
landscape imposed, but from that impression I was recalled and startled
by the guard, who came along telling us that things were righted and
that the train would start again; soon we were in our places and the
rapid movement isolated for me the memory of a singularly vivid scene. I
thought the place must have a name, and I asked a neighbour in the
carriage what it was called; he told me it was called Lake Trasimene.