After their first day's journey, the country lost some of its flatness; it rolled out gently before them, and they traveled from soft hollow to soft rise, as if they were tiny chips blown upon the frozen surface of a great sea.
Upon the surface of this sea, among the slow hollows and crests, Will Andrews found himself less and less conscious of any movement forward. During the first few days of the journey he had been so torn with the raw agony of movement that each forward step his mount took cut itself upon his nerves and upon his mind. But the pain dulled after the [p.87:] first days, and a kind of numbness took its place; he felt no sensation of his buttocks upon the saddle, ... The horse beneath took him from hollow to crest, yet it seemed to him that the land rather than the horse moved beneath him like a great treadmill, revealing in its movement only another part of itself.
Day by day the numbness crept upon him until at last the numbness seemed to be himself. He felt himself to be like the land, without identity or shape; sometimes one of the men would look at him, look through him, as if he did not exist; and he had to shake his head sharply and move an arm or a leg and glance at it to assure himself that he was visible. p.96: The reality of their journey lay in the routine detail of bedding down at night, arising in the morning, ... It seemed to him that he moved forward laboriously, inch by inch, over the space of the vast prairie; but it seemed that he did not move through time at all, that rather time moved with him, an invisible cloud that hovered about him and clung to him as he went forward. p.180:
The days slid one into another, marked by evening exhaustion and morning soreness; as it had earlier, on their overland voyage when they searched for water, time again seemed to Andrews to hold itself apart from the passing of the days. {NB: loss of normal time sense} p.213/4: [p.213:]
Much of the time he slept; ... [p.214:] Awake, his mind was torpid and unsure, and it moved as sluggishly as his blood. Thoughts, unoccasioned and faint, drifted vaguely into his mind and out. He half remembered the comforts of his home in Boston; but that seemed unreal and far away, and of those thoughts there remained in his mind only thin ghosts of remembered sensation -- the feel of a feather bed at night, [etc.].
He thought of Francine. He could not bring her image to his mind, and he did not try; he thought of her as flesh, as softness, as warmth. Though he did not know why ..., he thought of her as a part of himself that could not quite make another part of himself warm. Somehow he had pushed that part away from him once. He felt himself sinking toward that warmth; and cold, before he met it, he slept again.
[end of chapter] p.239/240: [p.239:]
Week by week, and at last month by month, the men endured the changing weather. ... Day slipped into indistinguishable day, and week into week; Andrews had no sensation of passing time, nothing against which to measure the coming thaw of spring. Every now and then he looked at the notches in a stripped pine branch that Schneider had made to keep track of the days; dully, mechanically, he counted them, but the number had no meaning for him. He was made aware of the passing of the months by the fact that at regular intervals Schneider came up to him and asked him for his month's pay. At such times, he solemnly counted from his [p.240:] money belt the money Schneider demanded, wondering vaguely where he kept it after he got it. But even this gave him no consciousness of passing time; it was a duty he performed when Schneider asked him; it had nothing to do with the time that did not pass, but which held him unmoving where he was. {NB: loss of normal time sense}