Nostromo | Page 7

threepence, are well aware that heaps of shining gold lie in the gloom
of the deep precipices cleaving the stony levels of Azuera. Tradition has it that many
adventurers of olden time had perished in the search. The story goes also that within
men's memory two wandering sailors-- Americanos, perhaps, but gringos of some sort for
certain--talked over a gambling, good-for-nothing mozo, and the three stole a donkey to
carry for them a bundle of dry sticks, a water-skin, and provisions enough to last a few
days. Thus accompanied, and with revolvers at their belts, they had started to chop their
way with machetes through the thorny scrub on the neck of the peninsula.
On the second evening an upright spiral of smoke (it could only have been from their
camp-fire) was seen for the first time within memory of man standing up faintly upon the
sky above a razor-backed ridge on the stony head. The crew of a coasting schooner, lying
becalmed three miles off the shore, stared at it with amazement till dark. A negro
fisherman, living in a lonely hut in a little bay near by, had seen the start and was on the
lookout for some sign. He called to his wife just as the sun was about to set. They had
watched the strange portent with envy, incredulity, and awe.
The impious adventurers gave no other sign. The sailors, the Indian, and the stolen burro
were never seen again. As to the mozo, a Sulaco man--his wife paid for some masses, and
the poor four-footed beast, being without sin, had been probably permitted to die; but the
two gringos, spectral and alive, are believed to be dwelling to this day amongst the rocks,
under the fatal spell of their success. Their souls cannot tear themselves away from their
bodies mounting guard over the discovered treasure. They are now rich and hungry and

thirsty--a strange theory of tenacious gringo ghosts suffering in their starved and parched
flesh of defiant heretics, where a Christian would have renounced and been released.
These, then, are the legendary inhabitants of Azuera guarding its forbidden wealth; and
the shadow on the sky on one side with the round patch of blue haze blurring the bright
skirt of the horizon on the other, mark the two outermost points of the bend which bears
the name of Golfo Placido, because never a strong wind had been known to blow upon its
waters.
On crossing the imaginary line drawn from Punta Mala to Azuera the ships from Europe
bound to Sulaco lose at once the strong breezes of the ocean. They become the prey of
capricious airs that play with them for thirty hours at a stretch sometimes. Before them
the head of the calm gulf is filled on most days of the year by a great body of motionless
and opaque clouds. On the rare clear mornings another shadow is cast upon the sweep of
the gulf. The dawn breaks high behind the towering and serrated wall of the Cordillera, a
clear-cut vision of dark peaks rearing their steep slopes on a lofty pedestal of forest rising
from the very edge of the shore. Amongst them the white head of Higuerota rises
majestically upon the blue. Bare clusters of enormous rocks sprinkle with tiny black dots
the smooth dome of snow.
Then, as the midday sun withdraws from the gulf the shadow of the mountains, the
clouds begin to roll out of the lower valleys. They swathe in sombre tatters the naked
crags of precipices above the wooded slopes, hide the peaks, smoke in stormy trails
across the snows of Higuerota. The Cordillera is gone from you as if it had dissolved
itself into great piles of grey and black vapours that travel out slowly to seaward and
vanish into thin air all along the front before the blazing heat of the day. The wasting
edge of the cloud-bank always strives for, but seldom wins, the middle of the gulf. The
sun--as the sailors say--is eating it up. Unless perchance a sombre thunder-head breaks
away from the main body to career all over the gulf till it escapes into the offing beyond
Azuera, where it bursts suddenly into flame and crashes like a sinster pirate-ship of the
air, hove-to above the horizon, engaging the sea.
At night the body of clouds advancing higher up the sky smothers the whole quiet gulf
below with an impenetrable darkness, in which the sound of the falling showers can be
heard beginning and ceasing abruptly--now here, now there. Indeed, these cloudy nights
are proverbial with the seamen along the whole west coast of a great continent. Sky, land,
and sea disappear together out of the world when the Placido--as the saying is--goes to
sleep under its black poncho.