{
  "title": "AT THE END OF THE PASSAGE",
  "category": "[SHORT-STORY]",
  "article": "“He has employed the grotesque, the horrible, and very often the eerie in his plots, looking with\nanxious but never credulous eyes at what may be distinguished or imagined ‘at the end of the\npassage,’ in the half-world betwixt fact and dream.”\nGhost story by Rudyard Kipling…\n“First published in the United States on 20 July 1890 in the Boston Herald… Collected in 1891\nin an authorized volume Mine Own People and in Life’s Handicap (1891) in the United Kingdom.\n“Four young men, a doctor, a civil servant, a surveyor, and an engineer, get together each week\nin the engineer’s house in a remote station, to dine and chat. It is the summer season, and there is\nno escape from the heat and dust, and little to entertain them. Hummil, the engineer, is near the\nend of his tether, arguing stridently with the others, in a vile temper. He has not slept properly for\ndays, and when he does drop off, he is afflicted by fearful dreams. He has put a spur in his bed to\nstop himself drifting into the shallow sleep of nightmares.\n“The doctor, Spurstow, unloads Hummil’s gun, lest he shoot himself, and gives him bromide to\nhelp him sleep deeply. But when they return a week later, they find him dead. There are images of\nhorror in the dead eyes.\n“See Philip Mason (p. 101) for an examination of this story—he believes Kipling himself may\nhave experienced similar unspeakable fear coming in dreams.”\n“[JMS Tompkins (p. 205): I cannot be sure that ‘the blind face that cries and can’t wipe its eyes,’\nwhich appears with horrible facetiousness in ‘La Nuit Blanche’ in Departmental Ditties and as\npure horror in (this story) rose in Kipling’s own dreams, but he himself has told us in ‘Brazilian\nSketches’ that once in a child’s dream he wandered into a Fifth Quarter of the world and ‘found\neverything different from all previous knowledge,’ and the memory of that dream must have\nprovided the groundwork for George Cottar’s wanderings in ‘The Brushwood Boy’…\n“Braybooke (Kipling’s Soldiers) regards this as a study of a man driven mad by three elementals:\n‘The sense of being alone, the force of the pitiless sun…and the curse of being unable to sleep…\nSomething robs Hummil of sleep and his mind slowly but surely goes.’”",
  "origination": "",
  "duration": "",
  "personnel": "",
  "extant_recordings": "",
  "chronology": "RETOLD TALES (WJZ, NEW YORK—NBC-BLUE)\n[Sunday—6:30-7:00 PM]\nSeptember 15, 1929\n“At the End of the Passage”\nSCRIPT: Finis Farr (adapted from the story by Rudyard Kipling).\nCAST: John Brewster (Hummil), George Graham (Spurstow), William Johnstone\n(Mottran), Horace Sinclair (Lowndes).\nTALES OF THE TITANS (WJZ, NEW YORK—NBC-BLUE)\n[Monday—7:30-8:00 PM]\nMay 29, 1933\n“At the End of the Passage”\nSCRIPT: Finis Farr.\n(HOME SERVICE, LONDON—BBC)\n[Sunday—8:30-9:15 PM]\nOctober 21, 1962\n“At the End of the Passage”\nPERSONNEL: Mollie Hardwick (producer).\nTALES OF THE SUPERNATURAL (HOME SERVICE, LONDON—BBC)\n[Friday—5:25-5:55 PM]\nDecember 23, 1966\n“At the End of the Passage”\n[BBC TITLE CARD: “Hummil, the engineer in charge of a new Gaudhari\nState Railway line, invites the only other three Englishmen within 100\nmiles to his bungalow every Sunday. They play cards, complain of the\nheat and conditions etc. but anything is better for them than loneliness.\nOn this Sunday, Hummil behaves rather oddly and admits to not having\nslept for some time. One of the men, a doctor, stays with him that night\nwhen the others leave. It is obvious that Hummil is terrified. After an\ninjection Hummil sleeps and next morning seems normal. When the\nfriends call a week later, he is dead with a look of stark terror on his\nface.”]\nSCRIPT: A. R. Rawlinson.\nPERSONNEL: David Davis (producer).\nEXTANT RECORDING\nTHE CBS RADIO MYSTERY THEATER (WRVR, NEW YORK—CBS)\n[???day—10:07-11:00 PM]\nOctober 10, 1979\n“At the End of the Passage”\n[“…A British engineer in charge of building a railroad in the hot, disease-\nridden interior of India faces an adventure of a lifetime. The unrelenting\nheat was debilitating. Life was temporary and cheap. To the credit of the\nBritish, they worked hard to improve the lot of the natives, at the same\ntime trying to cling to their own more civilized ways. Sometimes they\ncracked up…”]\nSCRIPT: Roy Winsor.\nPERSONNEL: Himan Brown (producer-director).\nCAST: John Beal (Hummil), Court Benson (Spurstow), Earl Hammond\n(Lowndes).\n[EXTANT RECORDING]",
  "sources": "",
  "gallery": "",
  "images": []
}