Collis stood beside her trap for a while, and then went over without a word and took the rough rope rein of his own mount. Over in the far corner of the yard, sitting in the open doorway of a boxcar marked ‘Specie & US Mails’, were a dozen Jamaican porters, most of them half-naked. At a signal from the railroad official, they jumped down from the boxcar and gathered up all the hand baggage that couldn’t be strapped to the mules and began to file out of the railroad yard and along the muddy road towards the town. One of them, the last, even carried a small boy on his back, on a wooden seat that was fastened around his shiny black head with a cloth band. The boy, in a sodden sailor suit, was pale-faced and fast asleep.

The chief muleteer, a fat man in a wide straw hat, now called, ‘Hoi, hoi, hoi,’ and waved his arm like a threshing flail, for everyone to follow. Unsteadily, everyone did so, shaken in their rickety traps, or with their bottoms swaying dangerously on the narrow wet backs of their mules.

Collis had never seen a town so dilapidated and discouraging as Aspinwall. Front Street, along which they followed the rusting tracks the of the trans-Panama railroad, faced out across the misty harbour, where small sailboats glided like ghosts. On the east side of the street, towards the town itself, there was a white stone freight depot, a couple of derelict wooden houses, one of which sported a fading sign that read ‘Café du Chemin de Fer’, an icehouse, two tired-looking saloons, a railroad office, and further along, the Hotel Colón, a run-down three-storey balconied building.

The street was unpaved, and thick with oozing, blue-black mud. It was littered with empty bottles, dead dogs, broken chairbacks, and garbage. On the front verandas of the buildings opposite, idle Jamaicans watched the slow, slippery progress of the Virginia’s small cavalcade with glazed indifference. The population of Aspinwall was almost all black, and almost all poverty-stricken. They were the remnants of the Caribbean work force that the founders of the Panama Railroad Company had brought over, along with Chinese and Irish, to lay the tracks across the isthmus; and now they rotted, along with the town in which they lived, in a swampish miasma of disease, heat, and hopelessness. All that the founders had left behind of themselves was a red-granite memorial, streaked with rain, which was dedicated to the vision and fortitude of John Lloyd Stephens, Henry Chauncey, and William Henry Aspinwall.

Collis took a long look at the memorial as he rode past it. Then he raised his eyes upward, above the wet red rooftops, where huge black buzzards wheeled tirelessly around and around and around, as if the town itself were a corpse from which they could pick; and the rain fell as if it were going to fall for ever.