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.

He left his hotel room and walked along the corridor until he came to the stairs. Although it was well past midnight, the bar down below was still open, and someone was playing a slow and sentimental tune on the piano. The hotel lobby must have been lavish once, in the days when the railroad was being constructed, but now it looked more like a barn that someone had perversely painted with dim murals of naked nymphs and Doric temples. Under the sagging chandelier, twenty or thirty men sat at scratched and drink-stained tables with their hats firmly on their heads, drinking bourbon and smoking pipes, talking too loudly and wishing to God they were someplace else. Three fans revolved uselessly, making no impression on the sodden heat or the dense tobacco smoke. By the desk was a black-framed list of the hotel rules — no smoking in the bath, no spitting off the balconies, no more than three to the bed. There were no palms in the hotel foyer, as in the hotels in New York; the management’s policy was that if a guest wanted to look at a palm, he could step outside the door and see enough damned palms to last him for the rest of his life.