We stopped at Sidney and my guidebook recommended a hotel called the Lockwood, where I had a breakfast of eggs and weak, boiling coffee.

I sleep some of the time, then wake as the train jerks to a halt at … Dix, Antelope, Pine Bluffs … wooden platforms built in the scrub by pioneers, named after the first thing they saw – creeks, forests, animals or in some cases (Archer, Atkins) presumably a brave surveyor. It is so grand, so redolent of human willpower even to the death, aching horses, covered wagons, children playing in the dust …

And then Cheyenne. About twenty-five years ago, they took the railroad over Crow Creek and the town grew up around the bridge they built for it. They named the town itself after the tribe whose lands they’d taken. Now there’s a big Railroad House with sixty guest beds and a huge dining room with heads of buffalo, antelope and even sheep. It’s a wonder they didn’t put an Indian scalp up there. I had dinner with a friendly local man who introduced himself as Casper Kingsley. He wore a cowboy hat and a pointed beard. He’s an authority on local history and told me that in the early days there were gambling dens and ‘cat houses’ and drunken brawls, many of which led to death by knife or gun. Then a group of what he called ‘law-abiding citizens’ took matters into their own hands. Several of the worst drunks and murderers were found hanging one morning from the end of a rope. Others left the city and its ‘law-abiding’ people in a hurry.

We go on through mountain, desert, rock. Cooper’s Lake, Aurora, Medicine Bow. There was even a stop called Separation …

Oh, Sonia, reading this back, I see how little I have conveyed what I have really felt in my travels – the utter loneliness, as though I knew not one soul in the wide world, had never seen your dear face; I sometimes wonder if you really still exist. The appalling strangeness of being entirely alone in this enormous world, a little collection of cells hurried west in clanking wagons. Above all this pointless sense of being alive, of being a soul – a self – perhaps for ever.

If the soul is not distinct enough to die, then what one wants is the utter extinction of all consciousness – because there is no rest in individual death … The belief of Buddhists that one’s soul returns again and again on its climb to perfection is surely absurd. But what we can manifestly see is just as terrifying – as one is extinguished, another, near-identical, reaches self-awareness, and all the old intractable problems begin again. It is intolerable. The human mind has evolved in a way that makes it unable to deal with the pain of its own existence. No other creature is like this.

Anton put down the letter for a moment. It was as though this man could read his mind and was speaking his thoughts. He remembered sitting on the balcony of the wooden house in the jungle near Colón, writing to Delphine, and trying to express the same ideas. Jacques’s letter ended: