This story takes place in the desert, and sand is invoked in a way that is both literal and metaphorical. Sand is inhospitable to roots and growth but is also soft and embracing. One can run through sand in bare feet, as the village children do at the beginning of the story; at the same time, the sand covers their tracks as soon as they have been made. The story compares the desert to the ocean in its combination of resistance and softness: “[The sand] lapped all around, from sky to sky, cast little rhythmical cups of shadow, so that the sand became the sea” (43).

At the end of the story, the disillusioned wife on the train experiences her despair as “the sound of sand pouring” (47). The sense is that she is being buried alive so that the sand’s softness is ultimately a form of brutality. Her shame has to do with a sense of herself as a creature of privilege, on the winning side of an unfair class struggle. The sand can be seen as a metaphor for the barren capitalist society of which she is a part.