While the story focuses on a train stopped in a station, it conveys a sense of movement and volatility. The train is still, but the narrator’s perspective is roving and restless. We move back and forth between the passengers on the train, the vendors in the train station, and the stationmaster and his family. Random, unexplained figures appear: a man who walks the length of the train to chat with the conductor, and a woman standing in her yard who looks up at the sound of the train’s departure.

This swirling perspective creates a sense of dislocation and strangeness. The passengers are unsettled in one way, being mostly (we assume) wealthy Westerners on vacation, while the native characters are unsettled in another way by their poverty and isolation. The landscape is a remote desert, giving the sense of a place where it is literally impossible to put down roots. The sand that the stationmaster’s children run through erases even their footprints: “[T]he sand, that lapped all around, from sky to sky, cast little rhythmical cups of shadow, so that the sand became the sea, and closed over the children’s black feet softly and without imprint” (43).