My dearest Delphine,

I am sitting on a wooden veranda in a jungle. I’m surrounded by snakes and monkeys, parrots and spiders. The cries of birds and insects quite unknown to me. It’s raining (it’s always raining in Panama). I have just had an early dinner – rice, peas and what may have been chicken, and am now drinking some cognac left by the previous occupant.

The villa was built for a French engineer. It’s on the Atlantic side, up on a hill, supposed to be safe from the landslides.

There’s an English journalist here as well, a man called Maxwell whom I met on the ship coming over. I had to have someone to talk to. Five weeks it took! Also, it’s good to have an English-speaker with me because although my English may be all right for tutoring Erich, it’s nothing like good enough for all the technical talk.

We have a West Indian maid, who is the sister of one of the labourers. Her name is Emerald and she’s devout. She prays for her brother day and night. She sleeps in a small back room and when not praying is sweeping the floor and muttering about the rain.

I’m going on the railway as soon as I can to meet her brother because I want to hear from him what his life’s been like. He’s been here for five years. It’s hard to get across to where he’s working, near the Pacific side, because the railway is still being used to carry away the ‘spoil’ – the rocks and earth they’ve dug out of the infamous Culebra Cut (known as ‘Hell’s Gorge’), which is a passage through the mountains they’ve enlarged by blowing out the rocks with dynamite.

From where I sit, the hillsides are entirely covered in trees, plants, creepers, undergrowth: green, breeding, dripping. When the French began their attempt at a canal more than thirty years ago, they sent in Chinese and West Indians with machetes and shovels. They died in their thousands from yellow fever and malaria. The river Chagres is in flood for half the year (it rains nine months out of twelve here). It buried the little paths they cut through the jungle under its mudslides. So many died that they had to put on special trains to take the bodies back up to the cemetery at Mount Hope, not far from here. Others were just rolled off the hillsides where they fell – down into the sodden undergrowth where the mud became their grave.

All right, my dear Delphine. I have a few moments of daylight left. Night falls at six ten. It takes no more than a couple of minutes – there’s no dusk to speak of. Eleven hours later, the dawn comes up like a thunderclap.

Now at this very moment in the wicker chair on my veranda, glass in hand, I’m looking down at a huge lake. It looks as though, like the jungle and the immense crocodiles, it’s been here since the world began. You can picture pterodactyls skimming above the water as the light fades.

But in truth it’s only a few years old. Some clever American engineer called Stevens had an idea. Instead of fighting the monstrous river with its constant floods, let’s make the river work for us. So they dammed the Chagres and let it flood an area of the central isthmus large enough to reach almost to Culebra. So most of the ‘canal’ is in fact a man-made lake! I won’t bore you with the engineering wonder of the locks at either end (though believe me they are a wonder). They will, when it opens next year, lift huge ships up in three steps to the height of the lake, then down again at the other end. In transit, the ships will float above the American watershed that runs from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego – what they call the ‘continental divide’.

As I sip the cognac, hearing the patter of the rain on the tin roof, I feel smaller than the tiniest cell in the giant organism of this earth. The mountain and jungle so magnificent, the animals so prehistoric, the diseases so deadly to a young species like us … And yet what we’ve done here! To tame the teeming, untouched land, to join two oceans and bring all nature under our command …

I think of you very often and of our rooms in Vienna, though I sometimes find it hard to believe that it all still exists. Did you find the material you wanted for the curtains? I miss you with all my body and soul and I hope that you are real, not the figment of a white man’s imagination here in fever country. Will you be there when I return? Will your hair be the same dark brown, tied with my favourite bow? Will your hands still slide across the keys and release the music hiding there? Will you still be my uncompromising teacher?

You can write to me at the poste restante at Colón. They seem quite efficient there and I enjoy meeting people in the saloon next to the telegraph office.

Je t’embrasse très fort.

A