The Great Skene Mystery by Bernard Capes — Read

Clank and fury and scream; by day and by night; squibbing like a fallen unspent comet the length of France, and leaving a shining trail as we go; by flat grey pastures, hardly billowing, and little churches with unfamiliar belfries, and rows of plumelike poplars, that pass and come again and flicker and dazzle like tall palings endlessly repeated; swooping at a perilous poise round the wine-shop ends of hamlets seemingly strayed and stranded in the fields, or grazing slow-crawling carts of a strange build, driven by stranger waggoners, as if the railway track were but a track after all, which we are wont to lose, and take up, and lose again; rushing, shrieking, upon little blue-smocked men, or, as often, women, who stand waving absurd flags at level-crossings, and only missing them, it appears, by the breadth of a wind-shaving; on again with a yell of baffled fury;

ripping, periodically, if we may judge by the sound, a passage through match-wood stations, which fly into splinters about us, and disregarding all warning signals of long white arms flung up -- so through a land, infinitely strange and wonderful to me, we go roaring southwards to our destiny.