But despite Atlas, Jonathan’s diaries say he did sleep the first few nights in Denver. Jonathan says he slept the deep, dreamless sleep of an anesthetized patient for whom time simply doesn’t exist; each morning he awoke to this queer fairyland around him with a sense of bubbling, almost uncontrollable exhilaration. Mountain air isn’t like prairie air. In the summer, air in the middle west steams and lowers: at the base of the Rockies it’s zesty like the water. There’s an excitement just to breathing, and there’s a glint to the sun and the way it lights things that middle westerners see only in winter. Then there are the magnificent, soaring piles of rock, a beauty so intense it’s oppressive: oppression, exhilaration, oppression, exhilaration, a masturbation of soul that makes reasoned behavior difficult for any beginner – and far, far more than that for somebody like Jonathan, whose whole life was as new to him as the landscape. The dreamless sleep didn’t last. On the fourth night he awoke in a state of abject terror – he didn’t know from what – and lay there all night, shaking with fear, drenched in sweat, unable to sleep at all.

This night was Sunday night. Monday morning he showed up at Frank Fleming’s office to be taken out to the tangle of tracks that made up the St Joe, Hannibal & Denver railroad yard beneath the mountains. Here, in the early morning light, he began his life on the trains – the man-made miracles of steel and steam, the huge, panting engines, the cars full of zinc, gold, longhorns, hides of buffalo and lion – these glorious instruments of his own freedom that ran along lines that drive onward and shift, drive onward and cross, drive onward and meet, mate up and lead to God knows where: to wonders beyond the reach of imagination. Frank introduced him to one of the men in the yard.

‘This here’s College,’ Frank said. ‘Ask him anything, but he’ll talk the bleedin’ bejesus out of you.’

‘Talk the bleedin’ bejesus out of you’ was right: this is College’s opening speech to my grandfather: to Jonathan Carrick, boughten boy, whom Alvah had instructed for years on end with grunts and shoves. ‘The soul of a railroad car is a sad, broken thing,’ said College, ‘just like the soul of a man. Here’s all this power lying powerless, man alone, aimless, meaningless. Then out of the dark – lo and behold – a god appears. And with him: aim, meaning, power.’