Forster also foreshadows the strang

Forster also foreshadows the strange effect of the Marabar Caves through his depiction of the landscape leading up to the caves. He emphasizes the inorganic element of the setting: though living things exist within it, there is no color, no movement, and no vitality. Everything seems “cut off at its root,” suggesting that the natural elements of the landscape have been perverted in some way. This perversion leads to a sense of illusion and confusion, as when Adela mistakes a stick for a snake. She corrects herself after looking through her field-glasses, but the villagers refuse to believe that the stick is not a snake after hearing her words. Within such a blank and empty landscape, words hold as much power as objects—and perhaps more. The natural world appears as a vacuum in which life does not exist, in which words fail to connect naturally to objects. Forster’s descriptions of this unnatural, inorganic landscape prepare us for the Marabar Caves themselves, which seem to nullify vitality, incite illusions, and render Mrs. Moore and Adela unable to use language to describe their experience.
The horror Mrs. Moore experiences in the Marabar Caves is the most intense manifestation of the sense of emptiness that is at the core of A Passage to India. The strange nothingness of Mrs. Moore’s experience is heightened by the fact that the episode is narrated not as it transpires, but in a more distant past tense than the immediate past tense that Forster uses in the rest of the novel. The effect is one of narrative absence, as if the narrator—and we as readers—must wait outside the cave, separated from the action until we learn of it through Mrs. Moore’s recall.