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He saw the darkening lands slipping away past him, the silent telegraph-poles passing his window swiftly every four seconds, the little glimmering stations, manned by a few silent sentries, flung by the mail behind her and twinkling for a moment in the darkness like fiery grains flung backwards by a runner.
I lay there until there was light enough to distinguish trees and telegraph-poles, and then walked on to Ath. After that, when they stopped me, if they could not read, the red seal satisfied them; if they were officers and could read, they cursed me with strange, unclean oaths, and ordered me, in the German equivalent, to beat it. It was a delightful walk.
The houses grew less frequent, with darker gaps of night between; and the rare street-lamps shone on cracked pavements, crooked telegraph-poles, hoardings tapestried with patent-medicine posters, and all the mean desolation of an American industrial suburb.
He didn't want anybody to think he was squirming, he said, for he wasn't. Some men got up against telegraph-poles, and others got up against guns or pneumonia or whatever happened to come along and it was all in the day's work. But when they did get up against it whatever it turned out to be that was the one time in their lives when it wasn't fair to worry 'em more'n was needed.
I felt conscious of my arms and legs, and of the whole of my big body, and did not know what to do with them or where to go. After walking for at least a couple of hours I noticed that from the station to the right of the line there were telegraph-poles which after about one and a half or two miles ended in a white stone wall.
We had a hot afternoon tramp up the valley, along the grassy bank of a rushing stream of clear water, past farmhouses, water-mills, and no end of wayside crucifixes and saints and Virgins. These crucifixes, etc., are set up in memory of departed friends, by survivors, and are almost as frequent as telegraph-poles are in other lands.
I was stunned and bewildered, tired beyond the power of words to describe, and black and blue all over from being jolted about. The road had been an excellent one, all the way level and wide, with telegraph-poles by its side. We shaved these very closely often enough, but certainly, amid all his tipsiness, Jim bore out his predecessors remark.
Never a wheel comes to Jabliak, and so it is a village without streets. Everything which passes here is horse-or woman-borne, and for hay they use long narrow sledges which slide over the stones and slippery grass as though it were snow. "Urrgh," said a man, "you should see this in winter. Snow ten and twelve feet deep, and only just the roofs and the tops of the telegraph-poles emerging."
Some people said it was the scale; some said it was the smoke; and some were sure that asphalt and "improving" the streets did it; but Bigness was in too Big a hurry to bother much about trees. He had telegraph-poles and telephone-poles and electric-light-poles and trolley-poles by the thousand to take their places. So he let the trees die and put up his poles.
The white wolf stretched himself to a canter, and slid away through the forest, dropping the trees past him like telegraph-poles past a railway-carriage window. He looked like the very spirit of winter, the demon of the snows, and stood for that in the ignorant minds of the sparsely scattered people perhaps because at a short distance he was nearly invisible.
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