Through the sparkling rain, only a hundred feet away across the muddy street, he saw a railroad train. It was obviously waiting for boxcars to be rolled out of the main yard before it went into the terminus itself. The locomotive was steely grey, with a tall bell-shaped smokestack, a green-painted cab with Gothic windows as elaborate as a gazebo, four huge driving wheels, and a red-painted cowcatcher. Behind it was a tender, piled with wood, as decorative and bright as a New York saloon on wheels. Behind that were four US Mail boxcars and six passenger cars with varnished sides and curtained windows.

In that dark, glittering night, with Limón Bay suffused in mist behind it, the locomotive and its train looked like a carnival. All its windows were alight, and from the lantern in front of the smokestack shone a wide beam that caught the falling rain in a whirl of gold. Showers of tiny red sparks flew into the night, while steam sizzled from the safety valve and dissolved around the wheels. An aroma of grease and woodsmoke mingled with the damp tropical putrefaction of Front Street.

Collis went back into his room to find a cigar, but he came back out again to light it, and to stare, while he smoked, at the shining train. He could see the engineer in his peaked calico cap and ticking-striped shirt, his back dark with sweat, and the fireman, stripped to the waist, tossing logs into the furnace. All along the length of the train, boxcar doors were being slid open and slammed shut, tappers were hammering and ringing at the wheels, and shunters stood in the rain waiting to marshal the train into the yard and disconnect it. They called and whooped in Jamaican patois and Spanish, and one of them blew persistently at a railroad whistle.

It was a carnival, but it was more. It was a carnival that rode through the jungle and the mountain passes, from one wide ocean to the other, and carried people of all kinds, people with ambitions and people with fears, cheap people and expensive people, liars and missionaries, to fresh and unknown destinies. It seemed to Collis like a strange decorated vehicle of human fate, a challenging and almost unmanageable apparatus which swept you out of your past and into your future whether you wanted to go or not. Right out there on Front Street, breathing and sniffling to itself in the equatorial heat, gilded and enamelled and enticingly bright, it was the sideshow that was going to bear Collis away to the rest of his life.