Nostromo | Page 6

on my first love. How we, a band of tallish schoolboys,
the chums of her two brothers, how we used to look up to that girl just out of the
schoolroom herself, as the standard-bearer of a faith to which we all were born but which
she alone knew how to hold aloft with an unflinching hope! She had perhaps more glow
and less serenity in her soul than Antonia, but she was an uncompromising Puritan of
patriotism with no taint of the slightest worldliness in her thoughts. I was not the only one
in love with her; but it was I who had to hear oftenest her scathing criticism of my
levities--very much like poor Decoud--or stand the brunt of her austere, unanswerable
invective. She did not quite understand--but never mind. That afternoon when I came in,
a shrinking yet defiant sinner, to say the final good-bye I received a hand-squeeze that
made my heart leap and saw a tear that took my breath away. She was softened at the last
as though she had suddenly perceived (we were such children still!) that I was really

going away for good, going very far away--even as far as Sulaco, lying unknown, hidden
from our eyes in the darkness of the Placid Gulf.
That's why I long sometimes for another glimpse of the "beautiful Antonia" (or can it be
the Other?) moving in the dimness of the great cathedral, saying a short prayer at the
tomb of the first and last Cardinal-Archbishop of Sulaco, standing absorbed in filial
devotion before the monument of Don Jose Avellanos, and, with a lingering, tender,
faithful glance at the medallion-memorial to Martin Decoud, going out serenely into the
sunshine of the Plaza with her upright carriage and her white head; a relic of the past
disregarded by men awaiting impatiently the Dawns of other New Eras, the coming of
more Revolutions.
But this is the idlest of dreams; for I did understand perfectly well at the time that the
moment the breath left the body of the Magnificent Capataz, the Man of the People, freed
at last from the toils of love and wealth, there was nothing more for me to do in Sulaco.
J. C.
October, 1917.

CONTENTS
PART FIRST
THE SILVER OF THE MINE
PART SECOND
THE ISABELS
PART THIRD
THE LIGHTHOUSE

NOSTROMO


CHAPTER ONE
IN THE time of Spanish rule, and for many years afterwards, the town of Sulaco--the
luxuriant beauty of the orange gardens bears witness to its antiquity--had never been
commercially anything more important than a coasting port with a fairly large local trade

in ox-hides and indigo. The clumsy deep-sea galleons of the conquerors that, needing a
brisk gale to move at all, would lie becalmed, where your modern ship built on clipper
lines forges ahead by the mere flapping of her sails, had been barred out of Sulaco by the
prevailing calms of its vast gulf. Some harbours of the earth are made difficult of access
by the treachery of sunken rocks and the tempests of their shores. Sulaco had found an
inviolable sanctuary from the temptations of a trading world in the solemn hush of the
deep Golfo Placido as if within an enormous semi-circular and unroofed temple open to
the ocean, with its walls of lofty mountains hung with the mourning draperies of cloud.
On one side of this broad curve in the straight seaboard of the Republic of Costaguana,
the last spur of the coast range forms an insignificant cape whose name is Punta Mala.
From the middle of the gulf the point of the land itself is not visible at all; but the
shoulder of a steep hill at the back can be made out faintly like a shadow on the sky.
On the other side, what seems to be an isolated patch of blue mist floats lightly on the
glare of the horizon. This is the peninsula of Azuera, a wild chaos of sharp rocks and
stony levels cut about by vertical ravines. It lies far out to sea like a rough head of stone
stretched from a green-clad coast at the end of a slender neck of sand covered with
thickets of thorny scrub. Utterly waterless, for the rainfall runs off at once on all sides
into the sea, it has not soil enough--it is said--to grow a single blade of grass, as if it were
blighted by a curse. The poor, associating by an obscure instinct of consolation the ideas
of evil and wealth, will tell you that it is deadly because of its forbidden treasures. The
common folk of the neighbourhood, peons of the estancias, vaqueros of the seaboard
plains, tame Indians coming miles to market with a bundle of sugar-cane or a basket of
maize worth about