He had slept, he supposed, for about two hours. He picked up his watch from the table, but it had stopped at ten o’clock. He looked around the room. There was a cream-painted closet, a battered bureau with a china jug and a basin, and a reproduction of the Madonna of the Rocks. His trunk must have been brought up while he slept, because it lay upended next to the bureau. There was a close smell of tropical mould and camphor, and it made him sneeze, twice.

He got out of bed, squatted down by his trunk, and unlocked it. Underneath his linen coat, securely wrapped up in a towel, was a bottle of red burgundy, which he had purchased on the steamer. He took it out, sat on the bed, and dug the cork out of it with his penknife. He swilled out with wine the cloudy tumbler that the management had left by his bed, and then poured himself a large glassful. The water, Andrew Jackson Hunt had warned him, was as dangerous as the night air.

He was sitting there drinking and wiping the sweat from his forehead with the towel when he heard a hoarse whistling sound. He frowned and listened. There was another sound, too. A monotonous pssshh-clank, pssshh-clank, followed by a long sharp exhalation of steam. He got up and went across to the window that gave out on to the balcony. Through the slats of the shutters, he could see orange lights flickering and hear loud voices talking in Spanish, and laughter. Collis unfastened the latch, opened the balcony door, and stepped out into the hot night air.

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.