AT THE END OF THE PASSAGE
[SHORT-STORY]
“He has employed the grotesque, the horrible, and very often the eerie in his plots, looking with
anxious but never credulous eyes at what may be distinguished or imagined ‘at the end of the
passage,’ in the half-world betwixt fact and dream.”
Ghost story by Rudyard Kipling…
“First published in the United States on 20 July 1890 in the Boston Herald… Collected in 1891
in an authorized volume Mine Own People and in Life’s Handicap (1891) in the United Kingdom.
“Four young men, a doctor, a civil servant, a surveyor, and an engineer, get together each week
in the engineer’s house in a remote station, to dine and chat. It is the summer season, and there is
no escape from the heat and dust, and little to entertain them. Hummil, the engineer, is near the
end of his tether, arguing stridently with the others, in a vile temper. He has not slept properly for
days, and when he does drop off, he is afflicted by fearful dreams. He has put a spur in his bed to
stop himself drifting into the shallow sleep of nightmares.
“The doctor, Spurstow, unloads Hummil’s gun, lest he shoot himself, and gives him bromide to
help him sleep deeply. But when they return a week later, they find him dead. There are images of
horror in the dead eyes.
“See Philip Mason (p. 101) for an examination of this story—he believes Kipling himself may
have experienced similar unspeakable fear coming in dreams.”
“[JMS Tompkins (p. 205): I cannot be sure that ‘the blind face that cries and can’t wipe its eyes,’
which appears with horrible facetiousness in ‘La Nuit Blanche’ in Departmental Ditties and as
pure horror in (this story) rose in Kipling’s own dreams, but he himself has told us in ‘Brazilian
Sketches’ that once in a child’s dream he wandered into a Fifth Quarter of the world and ‘found
everything different from all previous knowledge,’ and the memory of that dream must have
provided the groundwork for George Cottar’s wanderings in ‘The Brushwood Boy’…
“Braybooke (Kipling’s Soldiers) regards this as a study of a man driven mad by three elementals:
‘The sense of being alone, the force of the pitiless sun…and the curse of being unable to sleep…
Something robs Hummil of sleep and his mind slowly but surely goes.’”
[CHRONOLOGY]
RETOLD TALES (WJZ, NEW YORK—NBC-BLUE)
[Sunday—6:30-7:00 PM]
September 15, 1929 “At the End of the Passage”
SCRIPT: Finis Farr (adapted from the story by Rudyard Kipling).
CAST: John Brewster (Hummil), George Graham (Spurstow), William Johnstone
(Mottran), Horace Sinclair (Lowndes).
TALES OF THE TITANS (WJZ, NEW YORK—NBC-BLUE)
[Monday—7:30-8:00 PM]
May 29, 1933 “At the End of the Passage”
SCRIPT: Finis Farr.
(HOME SERVICE, LONDON—BBC)
[Sunday—8:30-9:15 PM]
October 21, 1962 “At the End of the Passage”
PERSONNEL: Mollie Hardwick (producer).
TALES OF THE SUPERNATURAL (HOME SERVICE, LONDON—BBC)
[Friday—5:25-5:55 PM]
December 23, 1966 “At the End of the Passage”
[BBC TITLE CARD: “Hummil, the engineer in charge of a new Gaudhari
State Railway line, invites the only other three Englishmen within 100
miles to his bungalow every Sunday. They play cards, complain of the
heat and conditions etc. but anything is better for them than loneliness.
On this Sunday, Hummil behaves rather oddly and admits to not having
slept for some time. One of the men, a doctor, stays with him that night
when the others leave. It is obvious that Hummil is terrified. After an
injection Hummil sleeps and next morning seems normal. When the
friends call a week later, he is dead with a look of stark terror on his
face.”]
SCRIPT: A. R. Rawlinson.
PERSONNEL: David Davis (producer).
EXTANT RECORDING
THE CBS RADIO MYSTERY THEATER (WRVR, NEW YORK—CBS)
[???day—10:07-11:00 PM]
October 10, 1979 “At the End of the Passage”
[“…A British engineer in charge of building a railroad in the hot, disease-
ridden interior of India faces an adventure of a lifetime. The unrelenting
heat was debilitating. Life was temporary and cheap. To the credit of the
British, they worked hard to improve the lot of the natives, at the same
time trying to cling to their own more civilized ways. Sometimes they
cracked up…”]
SCRIPT: Roy Winsor.
PERSONNEL: Himan Brown (producer-director).
CAST: John Beal (Hummil), Court Benson (Spurstow), Earl Hammond
(Lowndes).
[EXTANT RECORDING]