A portion of Ryszard Kapuscinski's Imperium, which is a poetic/journalistic attempt to describe a series of encounters with the force of Soviet Russia while it was a superpower, is dedicated to a journey by rail from Peking to Moscow. Kapuscinski's descriptions are very little marked by wonder (which a more romantic demeanor might attempt), and much more by the claustrophobia of the impossibly vast. Few authors have confronted this border-zone at the edge of experience with such candor, and it may be a response born out of the variety of means by which Kapuscinski came to such a meeting. Again in Shadows of the Sun as he narrowly escapes death in the deserts and cities of Africa sometimes by war, but more often by the indifference of the terrain; again in The Emperor as he depicts Ethiopia's mass starvation and the nearly impenetrable silence that disguised it.
It is this measurelessness that Kapuscinski meets again and again. He seems to chase it, wondering what it is to live in that kind of space and time. Or rather, since measurelessness is the impossibility of life, how it is that we continually push at that border to expand the realm of our imperium, and what it looks like at the cusp, from a train, through the dark glass of its aged windows.
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