 Part 0, author's note of Nostromo by Joseph Conrad. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Ernst Patinama. Nostromo by Joseph Conrad, author's note. Nostromo is the most anxiously meditated of the longer novels, which belong to the period following upon the publication of the typhoon volume of short stories. I don't mean to say that I became then conscious of any impending change in my mentality and in my attitude towards the tasks of my writing life. And perhaps there was never any change, except in that mysterious, extraneous thing which has nothing to do with the theories of art. A subtle change in the nature of the inspiration, a phenomenon for which I cannot in any way be held responsible. What, however, did cause me some concern was that after finishing the last story of the typhoon volume it seemed somehow that there was nothing more in the world to write about. This so strangely negative but disturbing mood lasted some little time. And then, as with many of my longer stories, the first hint for Nostromo came to me in the shape of a vagrant anecdote, completely destitute of valuable details. As a matter of fact, in 1875 or six, when very young, in the West Indies or rather in the Gulf of Mexico, for my contacts with land were short, few and fleeting, I heard the story of some man who was supposed to have stolen, single-handed, a whole lighter full of silver, somewhere on the Tierra Firm seaboard, during the troubles of a revolution. On the face of it, this was something of a feat. But I heard no details, and having no particular interest in crime, quake crime, I was not likely to keep that one in my mind. And I forgot it, till twenty-six or seven years afterwards I came upon the very thing in a shabby volume, picked up outside a second-hand bookshop. It was a live story of an American seaman, written by himself with the assistance of a journalist. In the course of his wanderings, that American sailor worked for some months on board a schooner, the master and owner of which was the thief of whom I had heard in my very young days. I have no doubt of that, because there could hardly have been two exploits of that peculiar kind in the same part of the world, and both connected with a South American revolution. The fellow had actually managed to steal a lighter with silver, and this, it seems, only because he was implicitly trusted by his employers, who must have been singularly poor judges of character. In the sailor's story, he is represented as an unmitigated rascal, a small cheat, stupidly ferocious, morose of mean appearance, and altogether unworthy of the greatness this opportunity had thrust upon him. What was interesting was that he would boast of it openly, he used to say. People think I make a lot of money in this schooner of mine, but that is nothing. I don't care for that. Now and then I go away quietly and live to borrow silver. I must get rich slowly, you understand? There was also another curious point about the man. Once, in the course of some quarrel, the sailor threatened him. What's to prevent me reporting ashore, which I have told me about at silver? The cynical ruffian was not alarmed in the least. He actually laughed. You fool, if you dare talk like that on shore about me, you will get a knife stuck in your back. Every man, woman, and child in that board is my friend, and who's to prove the light wasn't sunk? I didn't show you where the silver is hidden, did I? So you know nothing, and suppose I lied, eh? Ultimately, the sailor, disgusted with the sordid menace of that impenitent thief, deserted from the schooner. The whole episode takes about three pages of his autobiography, nothing to speak of. But as I looked them over, the curious confirmation of the few casual words heard to my early youth evoked the memories of that distant time when everything was so fresh, so surprising, so vengeanceome, so interesting, bits of strange ghosts under the stars, shadows of hills in the sunshine, man's passions in the dusk, gossip half forgotten, faces grown dim. Perhaps, perhaps there still was in the world something to write about. Yet I did not see anything at first in a mere story. A rascal steals a large parcel of valuable commodity, so people say it's either true or untrue, and in any case it has no value in itself. To invent a circumstantial account of the robbery did not appeal to me because my talent's not running that way. I did not think that the game was worth the candle. It was only when it dawned upon me that the paloiner or the treasure need not necessarily be confirmed rogue, that he could be even a man of character, an actor, and possibly a victim in the changing seas of a revolution. It was only then that I had the first vision of a twilight country, which was to become the province of Sulaco, with its high shadowy sierra and its misty campo, permute witnesses of events flowing from the passions of men, shortsighted in good and evil. Such are in very truth the obscure origins of Nostromo, the book. From that moment I suppose it had to be. Yet even then I hesitated, as if warned by the instinct of self-preservation from venturing on a distant and toilsome journey into a land full of intrigues and revolutions. But it had to be done. It took the best part of the years 1903-04 to do. With many intervals of renewed hesitation, lest I should loose myself any ever enlarging vistas opening before me as I progressed deeper in my knowledge of the country. Often also, when I had thought myself to stand still over the tangled-up affairs of the Republic, I would, figuratively speaking, pack my bag, rush away from Sulaco for a change of air, and write a few pages of The Mirror of the Sea. But generally, as I've said before, my surgeon on the continent of Latin America, vamed for its hospitality, lasted for about two years. On my return I found, speaking some part in the style of Captain Gulliver, my family all well, my wife heartily glad to learn that the fuss was all over, and our small boy considerably groaned during my absence. My principal authority for the history of Costa Guana is, of course, a venerated friend, the late Don José Avelianos, ministered with the Courts of England and Spain, etc., etc., in his impartial and eloquent history of fifty years of misrule. That work was never published, the reader will discover why, and I am in fact the only person in the world possessed of its contents. I have mastered them in not a few hours of earnest meditation, and I hope that my accuracy will be trusted. In justice to myself and to allay the fears of prospective readers, I beg to point out that the few historical illusions are never dragged in for the sake of parading my unique erudition, but that each of them is closely related to actuality, either throwing a light on the nature of the current events, or affecting directly the fortunes of the people of whom I speak. As to their own histories, I have tried to set them down, aristocracy and to people, men and women, Latin and Anglo-Saxon, bandit and politician, with as cool a hand as was possible in the heat and clash of my own conflicting emotions. And after all, this is also the story of their conflicts. It is for the reader to say how far they are reserving of interest in their actions, and in the secret purposes of their hearts revealed in the bitter necessities of the time. I confess that, for me, that time is a time of firm friendships and unforgotten hospitalities, and in my gratitude, I must mention here Mrs. Gould, the First Lady of Sulaco, whom we may safely leave to the secret devotion of Dr. Moneham, and Charles Gould, the idealist creator of material interests, whom we must leave to his mind, from which there is no escape in this world. About Nostromo, the second of the two racially and socially contrasted men, both captured by the silver of the Santomi Mine, I feel bound to say something more. I did not hesitate to make the central figure an Italian. First of all, the thing is perfectly credible. Italians were swarming into the Occidental province at the time, as anybody who will read further can see. And secondly, there was no one who could stand so well by the side of Giorgio Viola, the Garibaldino, the idealist of the old humanitarian revolutions. For myself, I needed there a man of the people, as free as possible from his class conventions, and all settled modes of thinking. This is not a side snarl at conventions. The reasons were not moral, but artistic. Had he been an Anglo-Saxon, he would have tried to get into local politics. But Nostromo does not aspire to be a leader in a personal game. He does not want to raise himself above the mass. He is content to feel himself a power within the people. But mainly Nostromo is what he is, because I received the inspiration for him in my early days from a Mediterranean sailor. Those who have read certain pages of mine will see at once what I mean, when I say that Dominic, the Padroni of the Trimolino, might under given circumstances have been an Nostromo. At any rate, Dominic would have understood the younger man perfectly, if scornfully. He and I were engaged together in a rather absurd adventure, but the absurdity does not matter. It is a real satisfaction to think that in my very young days there must, after all, have been something in me worthy to command that man's half-bitter fidelity, his half-ironic devotion. Many of Nostromo's speeches I have heard first in Dominic's voice. His hand on the tiller and his fearless eyes roaming the horizon from within the monkish hood shadowing his face, he would utter the usual exorgium of his remorseless wisdom, his other gentlium in a caustic tone with tanks on my ear yet, like Nostromo, du hombres finos, very much like Nostromo. But Dominic the Corsican nursed a certain pride of ancestry from which my Nostromo is free, for Nostromo's lineage had to be more ancient still. He is a man with a weight of countless generations behind him and no parentage to boast of like the people. In his firm grip on the earth he inherits in his improvidence and generosity, in his lavishness with his gifts and his manly vanity, in the obscure sense of his greatness and in his faithful devotion with something despairing, as well as desperate in its impulses. He is a man of the people, their very own unenvious force, disdaining to lead but ruling from within years afterwards, grown older as the famous captain Fidansa with a stake in the country, going about his many affairs, followed by respectful glances in the modernized streets of Sulaco, calling on the widow of the Cargador, attending the lodge, listening in unmoved silence to anarchist speeches at the meeting, the enigmatic patron of the new revolutionary agitation, the trusted, the wealthy comrade Fidansa, with the knowledge of his moral ruin locked up in his breast, he remains essentially a man of the people. In his mingled love and scorn of life, an indigo-wildered conviction of having been betrayed, of dying, betrayed, he hardly knows by what or by whom, he is still of the people, their undoubted great man with the private history of his own. One more figure of those stirring times I would like to mention, and that is Antonia Avellanos, the beautiful Antonia, whether she is a possible variation of Latin American girlhood, I wouldn't dare to confirm, but for me she is, always a little in the background by the side of her father, my venerated friend, I hope she has yet relief enough to make intelligible what I am going to say. Of all the people who had seen with me the birth of the Occidental Republic, she is the only one who has kept in my memory the aspect of continued life. Antonia the aristocrat and Nostromo the man of the people are the artisans of the new era, the true creators of the new estate, he by his legendary and daring feet, she, like a woman, simply by the force of what she is, the only being capable of inspiring a sincere passion in the heart of a trifle. If anything could induce me to revisit Sulaco, I should hate to see all these changes, it would be Antonia. And the true reason for that, why not be frank about it, the true reason is that I have modeled her on my first love, how we, a band of tallish school boys, the chums of the two brothers, how used to look up to that girl, just out of the schoolroom herself, as a standard bearer of her 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 wordliness in her thoughts. I was not the only one in love with her, but it was I who had to hear, often as her scathing criticism of my levities, very much like poor de coup, or standard-brown of her, or steer an answerable 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 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 José Avellanos, and with a lingering, tender, faithful glance at the medallion memorial to Martin de Coup, going at serenely into the sunshine of the plaza with our 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 eyelist of dreams, for I did understand perfectly well at the time that the moment the breath left the body of the magnificent cup of death, the man of the people, freed at last from the tores of love and wealth. There was nothing more for me to do in Sulaco. J.C. October 1917 End of Part Zero, Author's Note Recording by Ernst Patinama, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Chapter 1 of Nostromo This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Read by Gazina. Nostromo, A Tale of the Seaboard by Joseph Conrad So foul a sky clears not without a storm. Shakespeare Dedicated to John Goldsworthy Chapter 1 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 and oxides and indigo. The clumsy deep sea galleons of the conquerors that needing a brisk gale to move at all would lie be calmed where your modern ship built on clipper lines forged 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 for the representations of a trading world in the solemn hush of the deep gulf of Placido as within an enormous semi-circular and unroofed temple opened to the ocean with its walls of lofty mountains hung with the morning draperies of cloud. On one side of this broad curve in the straight seaboard of the Republic of Costa Guana the last spur of the coast range forms an insignificant cape 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 neighborhood peons of the Estancias vacueros of the seaboard plains tame Indians coming miles to market with a bundle of sugar cane or a basket of maize worth about throppings 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 also goes 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 campfire was seen for the first time in the 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 nearby 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 empires adventurers gave no other sign. The sailors, the Indian and the stolen borough 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 defined 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 the one side with the round patch of blue haze blaring the bright skirt of the horizon on the other mark the two outermost points on 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 heirs 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 their very clear mornings another shadow is cast upon the sweep of the gulf. The dawn breaks high behind the towering and serrated wall of the Corriera, 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 Higuerrota 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 swath in somber tatters the naked crags of precipices above the wooded slopes hide the peaks smoking stormy trails across the snows of Higuerrota. The Corriera is gone from you as if it had dissolved itself into great piles of grey and black vapours 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 somber 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 crushes like a sinister 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 a broccoli now here, now there. Indeed these cloudy nights are proverbial with the seaman along the whole west coast of a great continent. Sky, land and sea disappear together out of the world when the placidor, as the saying is, goes to sleep under its black poncho. The few stars left below the seaward frown of the vault shine feebly as into the mouth of a black cavern. In its vastness your ship floats unseen under your feet her sails flutter invisible above your head. The eye of God himself they add with grim profanity could not find out what work a man's hand is doing in there and you would be free to call the devil to your aid with impunity if even his malice were not defeated by such a blind darkness. The shores on the gulf are steep too all round. Three uninhabited islets baking in the sunshine just outside the bail and opposite the entrance to the harbour of Sulaco bear the name of the Isebols. There is the great Isebol the little Isebol which is round and Hermosa which is the smallest. That last is no more than a foot high and about seven paces across a mere flat top of a grey rock which smokes like a hot cinder after a shower and where no man would care to venture into the sole before sunset. On the little Isebol an old ragged palm with a thick bulging trunk rough with spines a very witch among palm trees rustles a dismal bunch of dead leaves above the coarse sand. The great Isebol has a spring of fresh water issuing from the overgrown side of a ravine. resembling an emerald green wedge of land a mile long upon the sea it bears two forest trees standing close together with a widespread of shade at the foot of their smooth trunks. A ravine extending the whole length of the island is full of bushes and presenting a deep tangled cleft on the high side spreads itself out on the other into a shallow depression abutting on a small strip of sandy shore. From that low end of the great Isebol the eye plunges through an opening two miles away as abrupt as if chopped with an axe out of the regular sweep of the coast right into the harbour of Sulaco. It is an oblong lake-like piece of water. On one side the short wooded spurs and valleys of the Cordillera come down at right angles to the very strand. On the other the open view of the great Sulaco plain passes into the opal mystery overhung by dry haze. The town of Sulaco itself tops of walls, a great cupola gleams of white miradors in a vast grove of orange trees lies between the mountains and the plain at some little distance from its harbour and out of the direct line of sight from the sea. End of Chapter 1 Chapter 2 of Nostromo This is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. Nostromo, a tale of the seaboard by Joseph Conrad. Chapter 2 The only sign of commercial activity within the harbour visible from the beach of the great Isabel is the square blunt end of the wooden jetty which the oceanic steam navigation company the OSN of familiar speech had thrown over the shallow part of the bay soon after they had resolved to make of Sulaco one of their ports of call for the Republic of Castiguana. The state possesses several harbours on its long seaboard but except Keita, an important place all are either small and inconvenient inlets in an iron bound coast like Esmeralda for instance 60 miles to the north or else mere open roadsteads exposed to the winds and fretted by the surf. Perhaps the very atmospheric conditions which had kept away the merchant fleets of bygone ages induced the OSN company to violate the sanctuary of peace sheltering the calm existence of Sulaco. The variable airs sporting lightly with the vast semi-circle of waters within the head of Azuara could not baffle the steam power of their excellent fleet. Year after year the black hulls of their ships had gone up and down the coast in and out, past Azuara, past the Isabelles, past Punta Mala, disregarding everything but the tyranny of time. Their names, the names of all mythology became the household words of a coast that had never been ruled by the gods of Olympus. The Juno was known only for her comfortable cabins of midships, the Saturn for the geniality of her captain and the painted and gilt luxuriousness of the moon, whereas the Ganymede was fitted out mainly for cattle transport and to be avoided by coast-wise passengers. The humblest Indian in the obscureous village on the coast was familiar with the Cerberus, a little black puffer without charm or living accommodation to speak of, whose mission was to creep in shore along the wooded beaches close to mighty ugly rocks, stopping obligingly before every cluster of huts and produce, down to three-pound parcels of India rubber bound in a wrapper of dry grass. And as they seldom failed to account for the smallest package, rarely lost a bullock and had never drowned a single passenger. The name of the OSN stood very high for trustworthiness. People declared that under the company's care their lives and property were safer on the water than in their own houses on shore. The OSN's superintendent in Sulaco for the whole Costa Guena section of the service was very proud of his company's standing. He resumed it in a saying which was very often on his lips, We never make mistakes. To the company's officers it took the form of a severe injunction. We must make no mistakes. I'll have no mistakes here no matter what Smith may do at his end. Smith, on whom he had never set eyes in his life, was the other superintendent of the service, quartered some fifteen hundred miles away from Sulaco. Don't talk to me of your Smith. Then calming down suddenly he would dismiss the subject with studied negligence. Smith knows no more of this continent than a baby. Our excellent senior Mitchell for the business and official world of Sulaco. Fussy Joe for the commanders of the ships. Captain Joseph Mitchell prided himself on his profound knowledge of men and things in the country. Cosas de Costa Guena. Amongst these last he accounted as most unfavorable to the orderly working of his company the frequent changes of government brought about by revolutions of the military type. The political atmosphere of the Republic was generally stormy in these days. The United Party had the knack of turning up again on the coast with half a steamer's load of small arms and ammunition. Such resourcefulness Captain Mitchell considered as perfectly wonderful in view of their utter destitution at the time of flight. He had observed that they never seemed to have enough change about them to pay for their passage ticket out of the country. And he could speak with knowledge for on a memorable occasion the life of a dictator together with the lives of a few Sulaco officials, the political chief, the director of the customs and the head of police belonging to an overturned government. Poor Senor Ripiera, such was the dictator's name, had come pelting eighty miles over mountain tracks after the lost battle of Socorro in the hope of outdistancing the fatal news, which he managed to do on a lame mule. The animal, moreover, expired under him at the end of the Alameda, where the military ban plays sometimes in the evenings between the revolutions. Sir, Captain Mitchell would pursue with portentous gravity, the ill-timed end of that mule attracted attention to the unfortunate rider. His features were recognized by several deserters from the dictatorial army amongst the restfully mob already engaged in smashing the windows of the Intendencia. Early on the morning of that day, the local authorities of Sulaco had fled for refuge to the OSN company's offices, a strong building near the shore end of the jetty, leaving the town to the mercies of a revolutionary rabble, and as the dictator was executed by the populace on account of the severe recruitment law, his necessities had compelled him to struggle. He stood a good chance of being torn to pieces. Providentially, Nostromo, invaluable fellow with some Italian workmen imported to work upon the National Central Railway, was at hand and managed to snatch him away, for the time at least. Ultimately, Captain Mitchell succeeded in taking everybody off in his own gig to one of the company's steamers. Nostromo, just then as luck would have it, entering the harbor. He had to lower these gentlemen at the end of a rope out of a hole in the wall at the back, while the mob which, pouring out of the town, had spread itself all along the shore, howled and foamed at the foot of the building in front. He had to hurry them, then, the whole length of the jetty. It had been a desperate dash, Nostromo, a fellow in a thousand, who at the head, this time of the company's body of Lighterman, held the jetty against the rushes of the rabble, thus giving the fugitives time to reach the gig lying ready for them at the other end with the steamer's flag at the stern. Sticks, stones, shots flew. Knives, too, were thrown. Captain Mitchell exhibited willingly the long cicatris of a cut over his left ear and temple made by a razor blade fastened to a stick, a weapon, he explained, very much in favor with the worst kind of nigger out here. Captain Mitchell was a thick, elderly man, wearing high-pointed collars and short side whiskers, partial to white waistcoats, and really very communicative under his air of pompous reserve. These gentlemen, he would say, staring with great solemnity, had to run like rabbits, sir. I ran like a rabbit myself. Certain forms of death are distasteful to a... respectable man. They would have pounded me to death, too. A crazy mob, sir, does not discriminate. Under providence we owed our preservation to my capitas de cargadores, as they called him in the town. A man who, when I discovered his value, sir, was just the bosson of an Italian ship, a big Genoese ship, one of the few European ships that ever came to Sulaco with a general cargo before the building of the National Central. He left her on account of some very respectable friends he made here, his own countrymen, but also, I suppose, to better himself. Sir, I am a pretty good judge of character. I engaged him to be the foreman and caretaker of our jetty. That's all that he was. But without him, Sr. Riviera would have been a dead man. This Nostromo, sir, a man absolutely above reproach, became the terror of all the thieves in the town. We were infested. Infested, overrun, sir, here at that time by ladrones and matreros, thieves and murderers from the whole province. On this occasion they had been flocking into Sulaco for a week past. They had sent at the end, sir. Fifty percent of that murdering mob were professional bandits from the Campo, sir, but there wasn't one that hadn't heard of Nostromo. As to the town Leperos, sir, the sight of his black whiskers and white teeth was enough for them. They quailed before him, sir. That's what the force of character will do for you. It could very well be said that it was Nostromo alone who saved the lives of these gentlemen. Captain Mitchell, on his part, never left them till he had seen them collapse, panting, terrified, and exasperated, but safe, on the luxuriant velvet sofas in the first-class saloon of the Minerva. To the very last he had been careful to address the ex-dictator as your Excellency. Sir, I could do no other. The man was down. Gasly, livid. One mass of scratches. The Minerva never let go her anchor that call. The superintendent ordered her out of the harbor at once. No cargo could be landed, of course, and the passengers for Sulaco naturally refused to go ashore. They could hear the firing and see plainly the fight going on at the edge of the water. The repulsed mob devoted its energies to an attack upon the Custom House, a dreary, unfinished-looking structure with many windows, two hundred yards away from the OSN offices, and the only other building near the harbor. Captain Mitchell, after directing the commander of the Minerva to land these gentlemen in the first port of call outside Costa Guana, went back to his gig to see what could be done for the protection of the company's property. That and the property of the railway reserved by the European residents, that is, by Captain Mitchell himself and the staff of engineers building the road, aided by the Italian and Basque workmen who rallied faithfully round their English chiefs. The company's Lighterman, too, natives of the Republic, behaved very well under their capitas. An outcast lot of very mixed blood, mainly Negroes, everlasting at feud with the other customers of low-grug shops in the town. They embraced with delight this opportunity to settle their personal scores under such favorable auspices. There was not one of them that had not, at some time or other, looked with terror at Nostromo's revolver poked very close at his face, or been otherwise daunted by Nostromo's resolution. He was much of a man, their capitas was, they said, too scornful in his temper ever to utter abuse, a tireless taskmaster, and the more to be feared because of his aloofness. And behold, there he was that day, at their head, condescending to make jocular remarks to this man or the other. Such leadership was in-spiriting, and in truth all the harm the mob managed to achieve was to set fire to one, only one, of the six sleepers, which, being creosoted, burned well. The main attack on the railway yards, on the OSN offices, and especially on the Custom House, whose strong room it was well known contained the large treasure in silver ingots, failed completely. Even the little hotel kept by old Giorgio, standing alone halfway between the harbour and the town, because with the safes in view they had neglected it at first and afterwards found no leisure to stop. Nostromo, with his cargadoris, was pressing them too hard then. End of chapter 2 Nostromo by Joseph Conrad. Part 1. The Silver of the Mine. Chapter 3 It might have been said that there he was only protecting his own. From the first he had been admitted to live in the intimacy of the family of the hotelkeeper who was a countryman of his. Old Giorgio Viola, a Genoese with a shaggy white Leonine head, often called simply the Garibaldino, as Mohammedans are called after their prophet, was to use Captain Mitchell's own words, the respectable married friend by whose advice Nostromo had left his ship to try for a run of shorelock in Costa Gona. The old man, full of scorn for the populace as your austere republican so often is, had disregarded the preliminary sounds of trouble. He went on that day as usual, pottering about the casa in his slippers, muttering angrily to himself as contempt of the non-political nature of the riot and shrugging his shoulders. In the end he was taken unawares by the outrush of the rabble. It was too late then to remove his family and, indeed, where could he have run to with the portly Signora Teresa and two little girls on that great plane. So barricading every opening, the old man sat down sternly in the middle of the darkened café with an old shotgun on his knees. His wife sat on another chair by his side, muttering pious invocations to all the saints of the calendar. The old republican did not believe in the saints or in prayers or in what he called priests' religion. Liberty and Garvaldi were his divinities but he tolerated superstition in women, preserving in these matters a lofty and silent attitude. His two girls, the eldest fourteen and the other two years younger, crouched on the sanded floor on each side of the Signora Teresa with their heads on their mother's lap, both scared but each in her own way, the dark-haired Linda, indignant the fair Gisele, the younger bewildered and resigned. The patrona removed her arms which embraced her daughters for a moment to cross herself and wring her hands hurriedly. She moaned a little louder. Oh, Jean-Baptiste, why are thou not here? Oh, why are thou not here? She was not then invoking the saint himself but calling upon Nostromo whose patron he was, and Giorgio, motionless on the chair to be provoked by these reproachful and distracted appeals. Peace, woman, where's the sense of it? There's his duty he murmured in the dark, and she would retort, panting, eh, I have no patience. Duty! What of the woman who has been like a mother to him? I bent my knee to him this morning. Don't you go out, Jean-Baptiste? Stop in the house, Battistino. Look at those two little innocent children. Mrs. Viola was an Italian, too, a native of Spezia, and though considerably younger than her husband already middle-aged, she had a handsome face whose complexion had turned yellow because the climate of Sulaco did not suit her at all. Her voice was a rich contralto, and when with her arms folded tight under her ample bosom she scolded the squat, thick-legged china-girls handling linen, plucking fouls, pounding corn in wooden mortars amongst the mud-out buildings at the back of the house, she could bring out such an impassioned, vibrating, sepulchral note that the chained watchdog bolted the chenal with a great rattle. Luis, a cinnamon-coloured mulatto with a sprouting mustache and thick dark lips, would stop sweeping the cafe with a broom of palm leaves to let a gentle shudder run down his spine. His languishing almond eyes would remain closed for a long time. This was the staff of the Casa Viola. But all these people had fled early that morning at the first sounds of the riot, preferring to hide on the plain rather than trust themselves in the house, a preference for which they were bound to blame. Since whether it true or not, it was generally believed in the town that the Garibaldino had some money buried under the clay floor of the kitchen. The dog, an irritable, shaggy brute, barked violently and whined plaintfully, in turns at the back. Running in and out of his kennel as rage or fear prompted him. Firsts of great shouting rose and died away like wild gusts of wind on the plain round the barricaded house. The fitful popping of shots grew louder and louder and louder and louder. Sometimes there were intervals of unaccountable stillness outside, and nothing could have been more gaily peaceful in the narrow bright lines of sunlight from the cracks in the shutters ruled straight across the cafe over the disarranged chairs of tables to the wall opposite. Old Giorgio had chosen that bare whitewashed room for a retreat. It had only one window, and its only door swung out upon the track of thick dust fenced by aloe timber in the town where clumsy carts used to creak along behind slow yokes of oxen guided by boys on horseback. In a pause of stillness Giorgio cocked his gun. The ominous sound wrung a low moan from the rigid figure of the woman sitting by his side. A sudden outbreak of defiant yelling quite near the house sank all at once to a confused murmur of growls. Somebody ran along the loud catching of his breath was heard for an instant passing the door. There were horse rubbed near the wall. A shoulder rubbed against the shutter, a facing the bright lines of sunshine penciled across the whole breadth of the room. Signora Teresa's arms, thrown about the kneeling forms of her daughters, embraced them closer with a convulsive pressure. The mob, driven away from the custom house, had broken up into several bands, retreating across the plain in the direction of the town. The subdued crash of irregular volleys fired in the distance was answered by faint yells far away. In intervals the single shots rang feebly and the low, long white building blinded in every window seemed to be the center of a turmoil widening in a great circle about its closed up silence. But the cautious movements and whispers of a routed party seeking a momentary shelter behind the wall made the darkness of the room striped by threads of quiet sunlight a light with evil stealthy sounds. The violas had them in their ears as though invisible ghosts hovering about their chairs had consulted in mutters as to the advisability of setting fire to this foreigner's casa. It was trying to the nerves. Old Viola had risen slowly, gun in hand, irresolute, for he did not see how he could prevent them. Already voices could be heard talking at the back. Signor Teresa was beside herself with terror. Ah, the traitor, the traitor! She mumbled almost inaudibly. Now we are going to be burnt and I'd bent my knee to him. No, he must run at the heels of his English. She seemed to think that Nostromo's mere presence in the house would have made it perfectly safe. So far she, too, was under the spell of that reputation the capitas de Cargarales had made for himself by the water side along the railway line with the English and with the populace of Sulaco. To his face and even against her husband she invariably affected to laugh it to scorn, sometimes goodnaturally more often with a curious bitterness. But then women are unreasonable in their opinions as Giorgio used to remark calmly on fitting occasions. On this occasion, with his gun held at ready before him, he stooped down to his wife's head and, keeping his eyes steadfastly on the barricaded door, he breathed out into her ear that Nostromo would have been powerless to help. What could two men shot up in a house do against twenty or more bent upon setting fire to the roof? Giambattista was thinking of the cassa all the time, he was sure. He, you think of the cassa, he gasps in your viola crazily. She struck her breast with her open bow, he thinks of nobody but himself. A discharge of firearms nearby made her throw her head back and close her eyes. Old Giorgio set his teeth hard under his white mustache and his eyes began to roll fiercely. Several bullets struck the end of the wall together, pieces of plaster could be heard falling outside, a voice screamed, here they come! And after a moment of uneasy silence there was a rush of running feet along the front. Then the tension of Old Giorgio's attitude and a smile of contemptuous relief came upon his lips of an old fighter with a Leonine face. These were not a people striving for justice but thieves. Even to defend his life against them was a sort of degradation for a man who had been one of Garibaldi's immortal thousand in the conquest of Sicily. He had an immense scorn for this outbreak of scoundrels and leperos who did not know the meaning of the word liberty. He grounded his old gun and turning his head glanced at the colored lithograph Garibaldi in a black frame on the white wall. A thread of strong sunshine cut it perpendicularly. His eyes accustomed to the luminous twilight made out the high coloring of the face, the red of the shirt, the outlines of the square shoulders, the black patch of the Bersaliere hat with cox feathers curling over the crown. An immortal hero. This was your liberty. It gave you not only life but immortality as well. For that one man his fanaticism had suffered no diminution. In a moment of relief from the apprehension of the greatest danger perhaps his family had been exposed to in all their wanderings he had turned to the picture of his old chief first and only, then laid his hand on his wife's shoulder. The children kneeling on the floor had not moved. Signore Teresa opened her eyes a little as though he had awakened her from a very deep and dreamless slumber. Before he had time in his deliberate way to say a reassuring word she jumped up with the children clinging to her one on gasp for breath and let out a horse shriek. It was simultaneous with the bang of a violent blow struck on the outside of the shutter. They could hear suddenly the snorting of a horse, the restive tramping of hoofs on the narrow, hard path in front of the house. The toe of a boot struck at the shutter again, a spur jingled at every blow, and an excited voice shouted, Hola! Hola! in there! End of chapter 3. Part 1. Chapter 4 of Nostromo This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Scott Carpenter. Nostromo by Joseph Conrad. Part 1. The Silver of the Mine. Chapter 4. All the morning Nostromo had kept his eye from afar on the Casa Viola, even in the thick of the hottest scrimmage near the Custom House. If I see smoke rising over there, he thought to himself, they are lost. Directly the mob had broken he pressed with a small band of Italian workmen in that direction, which indeed was the shortest line towards the town. That part of the rabble he was pursuing seemed to think of making a stand under the house, a volley fired by his followers from behind an alohedge made the rascals fly. In a gap chopped out for the rails of the harbour branch line, he mounted on his silver-gray mare. He shouted, sent after them one shot from his revolver, and galloped up to the cafe window. He had an idea that old Giorgio would choose that part of the house for a refuge. His voice had penetrated to them, sounding breathlessly hurried. Hola, veccio! Oh, veccio! Is it all well with you in there? You see, murmured old Viola to his wife. Signora Teresa was silent now, but outside Nostromo laughed. I can hear that Patrona is not dead. You have done your best to kill me with fear, cried Signora Teresa. She wanted to say something more, but her voice failed her. Linda raised her eyes to her face for a moment, but old Giorgio shouted apologetically. She's a little upset. Outside Nostromo shouted back with another laugh. She cannot upset me. Signora Teresa found her voice. You have no heart and you have no conscience, Giambattista! They heard him wheel his horse away from the shutters. The party he led were babbling excitedly in Italian and Spanish, inciting each other to the pursuit. He put himself at their head, crying, Avanti! He has not stopped very long with us. There is no praise from strangers to be got here, Signora Teresa said tragically. Avanti! Yes, that is all he cares for. To be first somewhere, somehow, to be first with these English. They would be showing him to everybody. This is our Nostromo, she loved ominously. What a name! What is that, Nostromo? He would take a name that is properly no word from them. Meantime Giorgio, with tranquil movements, had been unfastening the door. The flood of light fell on Signora Teresa, with her two girls gathered to her side, a picturesque woman in a pose of maternal exaltation. Behind her the wall was dazzlingly white, and the crude colors of the Garibaldi lithograph paled in the sunshine. Old Viola at the door moved his arm upwards as if referring all his quick fleeting thoughts to the picture of his old chief on the wall. Even when he was cooking for the Signori Inglesi, the engineers, he was a famous cook though the kitchen was a dark place. He was, as it were, under the eye of the great man who had led him in a glorious struggle under the walls of Gaeta, tyranny would have expired forever had it not been for that accursed Piedmontese race of kings and ministers. When sometimes a frying pan caught fire during a delicate operation with some shredded onions, and the old man was seen backing out of the doorway swearing and coughing violently in an acrid cloud of smoke, the name of Kavor, the arch-intrigger sold to kings and tyrants, could be heard involved in implications against the China girls, cooking in general, and the brute of a country where he was reduced to live for the love of liberty that traitor had strangled. Then Signori Teresa, all in black, issuing from another door advanced, portly and anxious and clining her fine black-browed head, opening her arms and crying in a profound tone, Giorgio, thou passionate man, Misericordia divina, in the sun like this he will make himself ill. At her feet the hens made off in all directions immense strides. If there were any engineers from up the line staying in Sulaco, a young English face or two would appear at the billiard room occupying one end of the house, but at the other end, in the café, Luis de Molado took good care not to show himself. The Indian girls, with hair like flowing black mains and dressed only in a shift and short petticoat, stared dully from under the square-cut fringes on their foreheads. The noisy fizzling of fat had stopped, and the storms floated upwards in the sunshine. A strong smell of burnt onions hung in the drowsy heat enveloping the house. And the eye lost itself in a vast flat expanse of grass to the west, as if the plain between the Sierra overtopping Sulaco and the coast range away there towards Esmeralda had been as big as half the world. Signora Teresa, after an impressive pause, remonstrated, Giorgio, leave Cavour alone and take care of yourself now we are lost in this country all alone with the two children because you cannot live under a king. And while she looked at him she would sometimes put her hand hastily to her side with a short twitch of her fine lips and a knitting of her black straight eyebrows like a flicker of angry pain or an angry thought on her handsome regular features. It was pain. She suppressed the twinge. It had come to her first a few years after they had left Italy to emigrate to America and settle at last in Sulaco after wandering from town to town. Trying shopkeeping in a small way here and there and once an organized enterprise of fishing in Maldonado for Giorgio like the great Garibaldi had been a sailor in his time. Sometimes she had no patience with pain. For years its knowing had been part of the landscape embracing the glitter of the harbor under the wooded spurs of the range and the sunshine itself was heavy and dull, heavy with pain. Not like the sunshine of her girlhood in which middle-aged Giorgio had wooed her gravely and passionately on the shores of the Gulf of Spezia. You go in at once, Giorgio. She directed. One would think you did not wish to have any pity on me with four signori Inglesi staying in the house. Va bene, va ben, Giorgio would mutter. He obeyed. The signori Inglesi would require their midday meal presently. He had been one of the immortal and invincible band of liberators who had made the mercenaries of tyranny fly like chaff before a hurricane, un uragano terribile, but that was before he was married and had children, and before tyranny had reared its head again amongst the traitors who had imprisoned Garibaldi, his hero. There were three doors in the front of the house, and each afternoon the Garibaldino could be seen at one or another of them with his big bush of white hair, his arms folded, his legs crossed, leaning back his Leonine head against the side, and looking up the wooded slopes of the foothills at the snowy dome of Igeruta. The front of his house threw off a black-long rectangle of shade, broadening slowly over the soft ox cart track. Through the gaps chopped out in the early-ender hedges, the harbour-branch railway laid out temporarily on the level of the plain, curved away at shining parallel ribbons on a belt of scorched and withered grass within sixty yards of the end of the house. In the evening the empty material trains of flat cars circled round the dark green grove of Sulaco and ran undulating slightly with white jets of steam over the plain towards the Casa Viola on their way to the railway yards by the harbour. The Italian drivers saluted him from the footplate with raised hand while the negro-brakesmen sat carelessly on the brakes looking straight forward with the rims of their big hats flapping in the wind. In return Giorgio would give a slight sideways jerk of the head without unfolding his arms. On this memorable day of the riot his arms were not folded on his chest. His hand grasped the barrel of the gun grounded on the threshold. He did not look up once at the white gnome of Igarota whose cool purity seemed to hold itself aloof from a hot earth. His eyes examined the plain curiously. Tall trails of dust subsided here and there. In a speckless sky the sun hung clear and blinding. Nots of men ran headlong, others made a stand, and the irregular rattle of firearms came rippling to his ears in the fiery still air. Single figures on foot raced desperately. Horsemen galloped towards each other, wheeled round together, separated at speed. Giorgio saw one fall, rider and horse disappearing as if they had galloped into a chasm. And the movements of the animated scene were like passages of a violent game played upon the plane by dwarfs mounted and on foot yelling with tiny throats under the mountain that seemed a colossal advance. Never before had Giorgio seen this bit of plain so full of active life. His gaze could not take in all its details at once. He shaded his eyes with his hand, till suddenly the thundering of many hoofs nearby startled him. A troop of horses had broken out of the fenced paddock of the railway company. They came on like a whirlwind and dashed over the line snorting, kicking, squealing in a compact, piebald, tossing mob of bay, brown, gray backs, bearing, necks extended, nostrils red, long tails streaming. As soon as they had leaped upon the road the thick dust flew upwards from under their hoofs and within six yards of Giorgio only a brown cloud with vague forms of necks and croppers rolled by, making the soil tremble on its passage. Viola coughed, turning his face away from the dust and shaking his head slightly. There will be some horse catching to be done before tonight, he muttered. In the square of Signore Teresa, kneeling before the chair, had bowed her head, heavy with a twisted mass of ebony hair streaked with silver, into the palm of her hands. The black lace shawl she used to drape around her face had dropped to the ground by her side. The two girls had got up hand in hand in short skirts, their loose hair falling in disorder. The younger had thrown her arm across her eyes as if afraid to face the light, Linda with her hand on the other shoulder stared fearlessly. Viola was in a state of confusion. The sun brought out the deep lines on his face, and energetic in expression it had the immobility of a carving. It was impossible to discover what he thought. Bushy gray eyebrows shaded his dark glance. Well, and do not pray like your mother. Linda pouted, advancing her red lips, which were almost too red. But she had admirable eyes, brown with a sparkle of gold in the irises, full of intelligence and her thin, colorless face. There were bronze glints in the somber clusters of her hair, and the eyelashes long and cold black made her complexion appear still more pale. Mother is going to offer up a lot of candles in the church. She always does when Nostroma has been away fighting. I shall have some to carry up to the chapel of the Madonna in the cathedral. She said all this quickly with great assurance and in an animated penetrating voice. Then giving her sister's shoulder a slight shake she added. And she will be made to carry one too. Why made?" inquired Giorgio gravely. Does she not want to? She's timid," said Linda with a little burst of laughter. People notice her fair hair as she goes along with us. They call out after her. Look at the rubial. Look at the rubiacita. They call out in the streets. She is timid. And you, you are not timid, eh?" the father pronounced slowly. She tossed back all her dark hair. Nobody calls out after me. Old Giorgio contemplated his children thoughtfully. There was two years' difference between them. They had been born to him late, years after the boy had died. Had he lived he would have been nearly as old as Jean Batista, he whom the English called Nostroma. But as to his daughters the severity of his temper is advancing age. His absorption and his memories had prevented his taking much notice of them. He loved his children but girls belonged more to the mother as affection had been expended in the worship and service of liberty. When quite a youth he had deserted from a ship trading to La Plata to enlist in the navy of Montevideo then under the command of Garibaldi. Afterwards in the Italian Legion of the Republic struggling against the encroaching tyranny of Rosas he had taken part on great plains on the banks of immense rivers in the fiercest fighting perhaps the world had ever known. He had lived amongst men who had declaimed about liberty, died for liberty. With a desperate exultation and with their eyes turned towards an oppressed Italy his own enthusiasm had been fed on scenes of carnage on the examples of lofty devotion on the din of armed struggle on the inflamed language of proclamations. He had never parted from the chief of his choice the fiery apostle of independence keeping by his side in America and in Italy till after the fatal day of Aspromante when the treachery of kings, emperors and ministers had been revealed to the world in the wounding and imprisonment of his hero a catastrophe that had instilled into him a gloomy doubt of ever being able to understand the ways of divine justice he did not deny it however it required patience he would say though he disliked priests and would not put his foot inside a church for anything he believed in God were not the proclamations against tyrants addressed to the peoples in the name of God and liberty God for men, religions for women he muttered sometimes in Sicily an Englishman who had turned up in Palermo after its evacuation by the army of the king had given him a bible in Italian the publication of the British and foreign bible society bound in a dark leather cover in periods of political adversity in the pauses of silence when the revolutionists issued no proclamations Giorgio earned his living with the first work that came to hand by a sailor as dark laborer on the quays of Genoa once as a hand on a farm in the hills above Spezia and in his spare time he studied the thick volume he carried it with him into battles now it was his only reading and in order not to be deprived of it the print was small he had consented to accept the present of a pair of silver-mounted spectacles from Senora Emilia Gult the wife of the Englishman who managed the silver mine in the mountains three leagues from town she was the only Englishwoman in Sulaco Giorgio Viola had a great consideration for the English this feeling born on the battlefields of Uruguay was forty years old at the very least several of them had poured their blood for the cause of freedom in America and the first he had ever known he remembered by the name of Samuel he commanded a negro company under Garibaldi during the famous siege of Montevideo and died heroically with his negroes at the fording of the Boyana he Giorgio had reached the rank of Ensign Alferez and cooked for the general later in Italy he with the rank of lieutenant rode with the staff and still cooked for the general he had cooked for him in Lombardi through the whole campaign on the march to Rome he had lassoed his beef in the Campana after the American manner he had been wounded in the defense of the Roman Republic he was one of the four fugitives who with the general carried out of the woods the inanimate body of the general's wife into the farmhouse where she died exhausted by the hardships of that terrible retreat he had survived that disastrous time to attend his general in Palermo when the Neapolitan shells from the castle crashed upon the town he had cooked for him on the field of Volterno after fighting all day and everywhere he had seen Englishmen in the front rank of the army of freedom he respected their nation because they loved Garibaldi their very countesses and princesses had kissed the general's hands in London it was said he could well believe it for the nation was noble and the man was a saint it was enough to look once at his face to see the divine force of faith in him and his great pity for all that was poor suffering and oppressed in this world the spirit of self-forgetfulness the simple devotion to a vast humanitarian idea which inspired the thought and stress of that revolutionary time had left its mark upon Giorgio in a sort of austere contempt for all personal advantage this man whom the lowest class in Sulaco suspected of having a buried horde in his kitchen had all his life despised money the leaders of his youth had lived poor had died poor it had been a habit of his mind to disregard tomorrow it was engendered partly by an existence of excitement adventure and wild warfare but mostly it was a matter of principle it did not resemble the carelessness of a condottier it was a puritanism of conduct born of stern enthusiasm like the puritanism of religion this stern devotion to a cause had cast a gloom upon Giorgio's old age it cast a gloom because the cause seemed lost too many kings and emperors flourished yet in the world which God had meant for the people he was sad because of his simplicity though always ready to help his countrymen and greatly respected by the Italian emigrants wherever he lived in his exile he called it he could not conceal from himself that they cared nothing for the wrongs of downtrodden nations they listened to his tales of war readily but seemed to ask themselves what he had got out of it after all there was nothing that they could see we wanted nothing we suffered for the love of all humanity he cried out furiously sometimes and the powerful voice the blazing eyes the shaking of the white mane the brown sinewy hand pointing upwards as if to call heaven to witness impressed his hearers after the old man had broken off abruptly with a jerk of the head and a movement of the arm meaning clearly but what's the good of talking to you they nudged each other the energy of feeling a personal quality of conviction something they called terribilita an old lion they used to say of him some slight incident a chance word would set him off talking on the beach to the Italian fisherman of Malonado in the little shop he kept afterwards in Valparaiso to his countrymen customers of an evening suddenly in the café at one end of the Casa Viola the other was reserved for the English engineers to the select clientele of the engine drivers foremen of the railway shops with their handsome bronzed lean faces shiny black ringlets glistening eyes broad-chested bearded sometimes a tiny gold ring in the lobe of the ear the aristocracy of the railway works listened to him turning away from their cards or dominoes here and there a fair haired basque studied his hand meantime waiting without protest no native of Costa Juana intruded there this was the Italian stronghold even the Sulaco policemen on a night patrol that their horses paced softly by bending low in the saddle to glance through the window at the heads in a fog of smoke and the drone of old Giorgio's declamatory narrative seemed to sink behind them into the plane only now and then the assistant of the chief of police some broad-faced brown little gentleman with a great deal of indian in him would put in an appearance leaving his man outside with the horses he advanced with a confident sly smile and without a word up to the long trestle table he pointed to one of the bottles on the shelf Giorgio thrusting his pipe into his mouth abruptly served him in person nothing would be heard but the slight jingle of the spurs his glass emptied he would take a leisurely scrutinizing look all around the room go out and ride away slowly circling towards the town end of chapter four part first chapter five of Nostromo this is a LibriVox recording this recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Scott Carpenter Nostromo by Joseph Conrad part first the silver of the mine chapter five in this way only was the power of the local authorities vindicated amongst the great body of strong-limbed foreigners who dug the earth, blasted the rocks drove the engines for the progressive patriotic undertaking in these very words eighteen months before the ascentisimo señor Don Vincent de Riviera the dictator of Costa Guana had described the National Central Railway in his great speech at the turning of the first sod he had come on purpose to Sulaco and there was a one o'clock dinner party a convite offered by the OSN company on board the Juno after the function on shore Captain Mitchell had himself steered the cargo lighter all draped the flags which in tow of the Juno's steam launch took the ascentisimo from the jetty to the ship everybody of note and Sulaco had been invited the one or two foreign merchants all the representatives of the old Spanish families then in town the great owners of the estates on the plane grave, courteous, simple men caballeros of pure descent with small hands and feet conservative, hospitable and kind the accidental province was their stronghold their Blanco party now it was their president dictator a Blanco of the Blancos who sat smiling or banely between the representatives of two friendly foreign powers they had come with him from Santa Marta to countenance by their presence the enterprise in which the capital of their countries was engaged the only lady of that company was Mrs. Gould the wife of Don Carlos the administrator of the Santo May Silver Mine the ladies of Sulaco were not advanced enough to take part in the public life to that extent they had come out strongly at the great ball at the Intendencia the evening before but Mrs. Gould alone had appeared a bright spot in the group of black coats behind the president dictator on the crimson cloth-covered stage erected under a shady tree on the shore of the harbor where the ceremony of the turning of the first sod had taken place she had come off in the cargo light her full of notabilities sitting under the flutter of gay flags in the place of honour by the side of Captain Mitchell who steered and her clear dress gave the only true festive note to the sombre gathering in the long gorgeous saloon of the Juno the head of the chairman of the railway board from London handsome and pale in a silvery mist of white hair and clipped beard hovered near her shoulder attentive smiling and fatigued the journey from London to Santa Marta in mail boats and the special carriages of the Santa Marta coastline the only railway so far had been tolerable even pleasant quite tolerable but the trip over the mountains to Sulaco was another sort of experience in an old Dilegencia over impassable roads skirting awful precipices we have been upset twice in one day on the brink of very deep ravines he was telling Mrs. Gould in an undertone and when we arrived here at last I don't know what we should have done without your hospitality what an out of the way place Sulaco is and for a harbor too astonishing ah but we are very proud of it it used to be historically important the highest ecclesiastical court was brought for two vice royalties sat here in the olden time she instructed him with animation I am impressed I didn't mean to be disparaging you seem very patriotic the place is lovable if only by its situation perhaps you don't know what an old resident I am how old I wonder he murmured looking at her with a slight smile Mrs. Gould's appearance was made youthful by the mobile intelligence of her face we can't give you your ecclesiastical court back again perhaps you shall have more steamers a railway, a telegraph cable a future in the great world which is worth infinitely more than any amount of ecclesiastical past you shall be brought in touch with something greater than two vice royalties but I had no notion that a place on a sea coast could remain so isolated from the world if it had been a thousandth miles inland now most remarkable has anything ever happened here for a hundred years before today while he talked in a slow humorous tone she kept her little smile agreeing ironically she assured him that certainly not nothing ever happened in Sulaco even the revolutions of which there had been two in her time had respected the repose of the place their course ran in the more populous southern parts of the Republic and the great valley of Santa Marta which was like one great battlefield of the parties with the possession of the capital for a prize and an outlet to another ocean they were more advanced over there here in Sulaco they heard only the echos of these great questions and of course their official world changed each time coming to them over their rampart of mountains which he himself had traversed in an old deligencia with such a risk to life in limb the chairman of the railway had been enjoying her hospitality for several days and he was really grateful for it it was only since he had left Santa Marta that he had utterly lost touch with the feeling of European life on the background of his exotic surroundings in the capital he had been the guest of the location and had been kept busy negotiating with the members of Don Vicente's government cultured men, men to whom the conditions of civilized business were not unknown what concerned him most at the time was the acquisition of land for the railway in the Santa Marta Valley where there was already one line in existence the people were tractable and it was only a matter of price a commission had been nominated to fix the values and the difficulty resolved itself into the judicious influencing of the commissioners but in Sulaco the occidental province for whose very development the railway was intended there had been trouble it had been lying for ages and scanced behind its natural barriers repelling modern enterprise by the precipices of its mountain range by its shallow harbor opening into the everlasting calms of a gulf full of clouds by the benighted state of mind of the owners of its fertile territory all these aristocratic old Spanish families all those Don Ambrosios this and Don Fernando's that who seemed actually to dislike and distrust the coming of the railway over their lands it had happened that some of the surveying parties gathered all over the province had been warned off with threats of violence in other cases outrageous pretensions as to price had been raised but the man of railways prided himself on being equal to every emergency since he was met by the inimical sentiment of blind conservatism in Sulaco he would meet it by sentiment too before taking his stand on his right alone the government was bound to carry out its part of the contract with the board of the new railway company even if it had to use force for the purpose but he desired nothing less than an armed disturbance in the smooth working of his plans they were much too vast and far reaching and too promising to leave a stone unturned and so he imagined to get the president dictator over there on a tour of ceremonies and speeches culminating in a great function at the first sought by the harbor shore after all he was their own creature that don vincente he was the embodied triumph of the best elements in the state these were facts and unless facts meant nothing Sir John argued to himself such a man's influence must be real and his personal action would produce the conciliatory effect he required he had succeeded in arranging the trip with the help of a very clever advocate who was known in Santa Marta as the agent of the gold silver mine the biggest thing in Sulaco even in the whole republic it was indeed a fabulously rich mine its so called agent evidently amount of culture and ability seemed without official position to possess an extraordinary influence in the highest government spheres he was able to assure Sir John that the president dictator would make the journey he regretted however in the course of the same conversation that General Montero insisted upon going to General Montero whom the beginning of the struggle had found an obscure child eastern frontier of the state had thrown in his lot with the Riviera party at a moment when special circumstances had given that small adhesion of fortuitous importance the fortunes of war served him marvelously and the victory of Rio Seco after a day of desperate fighting put a seal to his success at the end he emerged general minister of war and the military head of the Blanco party although there was nothing aristocratic in his descent indeed it was said that he and his brother orphans had been brought up by the munificence of a famous European traveler in whose service their father had lost his life another story was that their father had been nothing but a charcoal burner in the woods and their mother baptized Indian woman from the far interior however that might be the costagona press was in the habit of styling Montero's forest march from his commandancia to join the Blanco forces at the beginning of the troubles the most heroic military exploit of modern times about the same time too his brother had turned up from Europe where he had gone apparently as secretary to a consul having however collected a small band of outlaws he showed some talent as a guerrilla chief and had been rewarded at the pacification by the post of military commandant of the capital the minister of war then accompanied the dictator the board of the OSN company working hand in hand with the railway people for the good of the republic had on this important occasion instructed Captain Mitchell the mail boat Juno at the disposal of the distinguished party Dondinsente journeying south from Santa Marta and embarked at Caita the principal port of costagona and came to Sulaco by sea but the chairman of the railway company had courageously crossed the mountains in a ramshackle deligencia mainly for the purpose of meeting his engineer and chief engaged in the final survey of the road for all the indifference of a man of affairs to nature whose hostility can always be overcome by the resources of finance he could not help being impressed by his surroundings during his halt at the surveying camp established at the highest point his railway was to reach he spent the night there arriving just too late to see the last dying glow of sunlight upon the snowy flank of Igarota pillared masses of black basalt framed like an open portal a portion of the white field lying a slant against the west in the transparent air of the high altitudes everything seemed very near steeped as in an imponderable liquid and with his ear ready to catch the first sound of the expected deligencia the engineer and chief at the door of a hut of rough stones had contemplated the changing hues on the enormous side of the mountain thinking that in this sight as in a piece of inspired music there could be found together the utmost delicacy of shaded expression and the stupendous magnificence of effect Sir John arrived too late to hear the magnificent and inaudible strain sung by the sunset amongst the high peaks of the Sierra it had sung itself out into the breathless pause of deep dusk before climbing down the four-wheel of the deligencia with stiff limbs he shook hands with the engineer they gave him his dinner in a stone hut like a cubicle boulder with no door or windows in its two openings a bright fire of sticks brought on muleback from the first valley below burning outside sent in a wavering glare and two candles and tin candlesticks lighted it was explained to him in his honor stood on a sort of rough camp-table at which he sat on the right hand of the chief he knew how to be amiable and the young man of the engineering staff for whom the surveying of the railway track had the glamour of the first steps on the path of life sat there too listening modestly with their smooth faces tanned by the weather and very pleased to witness so much affability and so great a man afterwards late at night pacing to and fro outside he had a long talk with his chief engineer he knew him well of old this was not the first undertaking in which their gifts as elementally different as fire and water had worked in conjunction from the contact of these two personalities who had not the same vision of the world there was generated a power for the world service a subtle force that could set in motion mighty machines men's muscles and awaken also in human breasts an unbounded devotion to the task of the young fellows at the table to whom the survey of the track was like the tracing of life more than one would be called to meet death before the work was done but the work would be done the force would be almost as strong as a faith not quite however in the silence of the sleeping camp upon the moonlit plateau forming the top of the pass like the floor of a vast arena surrounded by the basalt walls of precipices two strolling figures and thick ulsters stood still and the voice of the engineer pronounced distinctly the words we can't move mountains Sir John raising his head to follow the pointing gesture felt the full force of the words the white Igarota soared out of the shadows of rock and earth like a frozen bubble under the moon all was still till nearby behind the wall of a corral for the camp animals built roughly blue stones in the form of a circle a pack mule stamped his forefoot and blew heavily twice the engineer in chief had used the phrase in answer to the chairman's tentative suggestion that the tracing of the line could perhaps be altered in deference to the prejudices of the Sulaco landowners the chief engineer believed that the obstinacy of men was the lesser obstacle moreover to combat that they had the great influence of Charles Gould whereas tunneling under Igarota would have been a colossal undertaking I guess Gould what sort of man is he Sir John had heard much of Charles Gould in Santa Marta and wanted to know more the engineer in chief assured him that the administrator of the Santa Marta silver mine had an immense influence over all these Spanish dons he had also one of the best houses in Sulaco and the Gould hospitality was beyond all praise they received me as if they had known me for years he said the little lady's kindness personified I stayed with them for a month he helped me to organize the surveying parties his practical ownership of the Santome silver mine gives him a special position he seems to have the ear of every provincial authority apparently and as I said he can wind all the Hidalgos of the province round his little finger if you follow his advice the difficulties will fall away because he wants the railway of course you must be careful in what you say he's English and besides he must be immensely wealthy the Holroyd house is in with him in that mine so you may imagine he interrupted himself as from before one of the little fires burning outside the low wall of the corral he looked in a poncho up to the neck the saddle which he had been using for a pillow made a dark patch on the ground against the red glow of embers I shall see Holroyd himself on my way back through the states said Sir John I've ascertained that he too wants the railway the man who perhaps disturbed by the proximity of the voices had risen from the ground struck a match to light a cigarette the flame showed a bronzed black whiskered face a pair of eyes gazing straight then rearranging his wrappings he sank lengthened and laid his head again on the saddle that's our camp master whom I must send back to Sulico now we are going to carry our survey into the Santa Marta Valley said the engineer the most useful fellow lent me by Captain Mitchell at the OSN company it was very good of Mitchell Charles Gould told me I couldn't do better than to take advantage of the offer he seems to know how to rule all these mule tears and peons we have not the slightest trouble with our people he shall escort your diligentsia right into Sulico with some of our railway peons the road is bad to have him at hand may save you an upset or two he promised me to take care of your person all the way down as if you were his father this camp master was the Italian sailor whom all the Europeans in Sulico following Captain Mitchell's mispronunciation were in the habit of calling Nostromo and indeed taciturn and ready he did take excellent care of his charge at the bad parts of the road as Sir John himself acknowledged to Mrs. Gould afterwards end of chapter 5 part 1 chapter 6 of Nostromo this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Christa Costa Nostromo by Joseph Conrad part 1 the silver of the mine chapter 6 part 1 at that time Nostromo had been already long enough in the country to raise to the highest pitch Captain Mitchell's opinion of the extraordinary value of his discovery clearly he was one of those invaluable subordinates whom to possess is a legitimate cause of boasting Captain Mitchell plumed himself upon his eye for men but he was not selfish and in the innocence of his pride was already developing that mania for lending you my capitas de cargadores which was to bring Nostromo into personal contact sooner or later with every European in Sulaco as a sort of universal fact totem a prodigy of efficiency in his own sphere of life the fellow is devoted to me body and soul Captain Mitchell was given to affirm and though nobody perhaps could have explained why it should be so it was impossible on a survey of their relation to throw doubt on that statement unless indeed one were a bitter eccentric character like Dr. Monagham for instance whose short hopeless laugh expressed somehow an immense mistrust of mankind not that Dr. Monagham was a prodigal either of laughter or of words he was bitterly taciturn when at his best at his worst people feared the open scornfulness of his tongue only Mrs. Gould could keep his unbelief in men's motives within due bounds but even to her on an occasion not connected with Nostromo and in a tone which for him was gentle even to her he had said once really it is most unreasonable to demand that a man should think of other people so much better than he is able to think of himself and Mrs. Gould had hastened to drop the subject there were strange rumors of the English doctor years ago in the time of Guzman Bento he had been mixed up it was whispered in a conspiracy which was betrayed and as people expressed it drowned in blood his hair had turned gray his hairless seemed face was of a brick dust color the large check pattern of his flannel shirt and his old stained Panama hat were an established defiance to the conventionalities of Sulaco had it not been for the immaculate cleanliness of his apparel he might have been taken for one of those lifeless Europeans that are a moral eyesore to the respectability of a foreign colony in almost every exotic part of the world the young ladies of Sulaco adorning with clusters of pretty faces the balconies along the street of the constitution when they saw him pass with his limping gait and bowed head a short linen jacket drawn on carelessly over the flannel check shirt would remark to each other here is the senior doctor going to call on Donna Emilia he has got his little coat on the inference was true its deeper meaning was hidden from their simple intelligence or however they expected no store of thought on the doctor he was old ugly, learned and a little loco mad if not a bit of a sorcerer as the common people suspected him of being the little white jacket was in reality a concession to mrs. Gould's humanizing influence the doctor with his habit of skeptical bitter speech had no other means of showing his profound respect for the character of the woman who was known in the country as the English Signora he presented this tribute very seriously indeed it was no trifle for a man of his habits mrs. Gould felt that too perfectly she would never have thought of imposing upon him this marked a show of difference she kept her old Spanish house one of the finest specimens in Sulaco open for the dispensation of the small graces of existence she dispensed with them simplicity and charm because she was guided by an alert perception of values she was highly gifted in the art of human intercourse which consists in delicate shades of self-forgetfulness and in the suggestion of universal comprehension Charles Gould, the Gould family established in Costa Guana for three generations always went to England for their education and for their wives imagine that he had fallen in love with a girl sound common sense like any other men but these were not exactly the reasons why for instance the whole surveying camp from the youngest of the men to their mature chief should have found occasion to allude to mrs. Gould's house so frequently amongst the highest peaks of the Sierra she would have protested that she had done nothing for them with a low laugh and a surprised widening of her grey eyes had anybody told her how convincingly she was remembered on the edge of the snow line above Sulaco but directly with a little capable air of setting her wits to work she would have found an explanation of course it was such a surprise for these boys to find any sort of welcome here and I suppose they are homesick I suppose everybody must be always just a little homesick she was always sorry for homesick people born in the country as his father before him spare and tall with a flaming moustache a neat chin clear blue eyes auburn hair and a thin fresh red face Charles Gould looked like a new arrival from over the sea his grandfather had fought in the cause of independence under Bolivar in that famous English Legion which on the battlefield of Karabobo had been saluted by the great liberator as saviors of his country one of Charles Gould's uncles had been elected president of that very province of Sulaco then called a state in the days of federation and afterwards had been put up against the wall of a church and shot by the order of the barbarous Unionist general Guzman Bento it was the same Guzman Bento who becoming later perpetual president fame for his ruthless and cruel tyranny readied his apotheosis in the popular legend of a sanguinary land-haunting specter whose body had been carried off by the devil in person from the brick mausoleum in the nave of the church of assumption in Santa Marta thus at least the priest explained its disappearance to the barefooted multitude that streamed in awestruck to gaze at the hole in the side of the ugly box of bricks before the great altar Guzman Bento of cruel memory had put to death great numbers of people besides Charles Gould's uncle but with a relative martyred in the cause of aristocracy the Sulaco oligarchs this was the phraseology of Guzman Bento's time now they were called Blancos and had given up the federal idea which meant the families of pure Spanish descent considered Charles as one of themselves with such a family record no one could have been more of a Costa Guanero than Don Carlos Gould but his aspect was so characteristic that in the talk of simple he was just the Inglés the Englishman of Sulaco he looked more English than a casual tourist a sort of heretic pilgrim quite unknown in Sulaco he looked more English than the last arrived batch of young railway engineers than anybody out of the hunting field pictures in the numbers of punch reaching his wife's drawing room two months or so after date it astonished you to hear him talk Spanish, Castilian as the native country or the Indian dialect of the country people so naturally his accent had never been English but there was something so indelible in all these ancestral ghouls liberators explorers coffee planters merchants revolutionists of Costa Guana that he the only representative of the third generation in a continent possessing its own style of horsemanship when on looking thoroughly English even on horseback this is not said of him in the mocking spirit of the Laneros men of the Great Plains who think that no one in the world knows how to sit a horse but themselves Charles Gould to use the suitably lofty phrase road like a centaur riding for him was not a special form of exercise it was a natural faculty as walking straight is to all men sound of mine and limb but all the same when cantering beside the Ruddy to the mine he looked in his English clothes and with his imported saddlery as though he had come this moment to Costa Guana at his easy swift Pesachrote straight out of some green meadow at the other side of the world his way would lie along the old Spanish road the Camino Reial of popular speech the only remaining vestige of a fact and name left by that royalty old Giorgio Viola hated and whose very shadow had departed from the land for the big equestrian statue of Charles IV at the entrance of the Alameda towering white against the trees was only known to the folk from the country and to the beggars of the town that slept on the steps around the pedestal as the horse of stone the other Carlos turning off to the left with a rapid clatter of hoofs on the disjointed pavement Don Carlos Gould in his English clothes looked as incongruous but much more at home than the kingly cavalier raining in his on the pedestal above the sleeping leperos with his marble arm raised towards the marble rim of a plumed hat the weather-stained effigy of the mounted king with its vague suggestion of a saluting gesture seemed to present an inscrutable breast to the political changes which had robbed it of its very name but neither did the other horsemen well known to the people keen and alive on his well-shaped slate colored beast with a wide eye where his heart was on the sleeve of his English coat his mind preserved its steady poise as if sheltered in the passionless stability of private and public decencies at home in Europe he accepted with a like calm the shocking manner in which the Sulaco ladies smothered their faces with pearl powder till they looked like white plaster cast with beautiful living eyes the peculiar gossip of the town and the continuous political changes the constant saving of the country which to his wife seemed a pure and blood thirsty game of murder and rapin played with terrible earnestness by depraved children in the early days of her Costa Guana life the little lady used to clench her hands with exasperation at not being able to take the public affairs of the country as seriously as the incidental atrocity of methods deserved she saw in them a comedy of naive pretenses but hardly anything genuine except her own appalled indignation Charles very quiet and twisting his long moustaches would decline to discuss them at all once however he observed to her gently my dear you seem to forget that I was born here these few words made her pause as if they have been a sudden revelation perhaps the mere fact of being born in the country did make a difference she had a great confidence in her husband it had always been very great he had struck her imagination from the first by his unsentimentalism by that very quietude of mind which she had erected in her thought for a sign of perfect competency in the business of living Don Jose Avalanos their neighbor across the street a statesman a poet a man of culture who had represented his country at several European courts and had suffered untold indignities as a state prisoner in the time of the tyrant Guzman Bento used to declare in Donna Amelia's drying room that Carlos had all the English qualities of character with a truly patriotic heart Mrs. Gould raising her eyes to her husband's thin red and tan face could not detect the slightest quiver of a feature at what he must have heard said of his patriotism perhaps he had just dismounted on his return from the mine he was English enough to disregard the hottest hours of the day Basilio in a livery of white linen and a red sash had squatted for a moment behind his heels to unstrap the heavy blunt spurs in the patio and then the senior administrator would go up the staircase into the gallery rows of plants and pots ranged on the balustrade between the pilasters of the arches screen the corridor with their leaves and flowers from the quadrangle below whose paved space is the true hearthstone of a South American house where the quiet hours of domestic life are marked by the shifting of light and shadow on the flagstones Senor Avalanos was in the habit of crossing the patio at five o'clock almost every day Don Jose chose to come over at tea time because the English ride at Donna Emilia's house reminded him of the time he lived in London as Minister Plenipotentiary to the court of St. James he did not like tea and usually rocking his American chair beat little shiny boots crossed on the foot rest he would talk on and on with a sort of complacent virtuosity wonderful in a man of his age while he held the cup in his hands for a long time his clothes cropped head was perfectly white his eyes cold black on seeing Charles Gould step into the Sala he would nod provisionally and go on to the end of the oratorial period only then he would say Carlos my friend you have ridden from Santomi in the heat of the day always the true English activity no? what? he drank up all the tea at once in one draft this performance was invariably followed by a slight shudder and a low involuntary burr which was not covered by the hasty exclamation excellent then giving up the empty cup into his young friend's hand extended with a smile he continued to expatiate upon the patriotic nature of the Santomi mine for the simple pleasure of talking fluently it seemed while his reclining body jerked backwards and forwards in a rocking chair of the sword exported from the United States the ceiling of the largest drawing room of the Casa Gould extended its white level far above his head the loftiness dwarfed the mixture of heavy straight back Spanish chairs of brown wood with leather and seats and European furniture low and cushioned all over like squat little monsters gorged to bursting with steel springs and horse air there were knickknacks on little tables mirrors led into the wall above marble consoles square spaces of carpet under the two groups of armchairs each presided over by a deep sofa smaller rugs scattered all over the floor of red tiles three windows from the ceiling down to the ground opening on a balcony and flanked by the perpendicular folds of the dark hangings the stateliness of ancient days lingered between the four high smooth walls tinted a delicate primrose color and Mrs. Gould with her little head and shining coils of hair sitting in a cloud of muslin and lace before a slender mahogany table resembled a fairy posed lightly before dainty filters dispensed out of vessels of silver and porcelain Mrs. Gould knew the history of the Santome Mine worked in the early days mostly on the backs of slaves its yield had been paid for in its own weight of human bones whole tribes of indians had perished in the exploitation and then the mine was abandoned since with this primitive method it had ceased to make a profitable return no matter how many corpses were thrown into its maw then it became forgotten it was rediscovered after the war of independence an english company obtained the right to work it and found so rich a vein that neither the actions of successive governments nor the periodical raids of recruiting officers upon the population of paid minors they had created could discourage their perseverance but in the end during the long turmoil of pronunciamentos that followed the death of the famous Guzman Bento the native miners incited to revolt by the emissaries sent out from the capital had risen upon their english chiefs and murdered them to a man the decree of confiscation which appeared immediately afterwards in the Diario Efficial published in Santa Marta began with the words justly incensed at the grinding oppression of foreigners actuated by sordid motives of gain rather than by love for a country where they come impoverished to seek their fortunes the mining population of Santome etc and ended with the declaration the chief of the state has resolved to exercise to the full of his power of clemency the mine which by every law is national, human, and divine reverts now to the government as national property shall remain closed till the sword drawn for the sacred defense of liberal principles has accomplished its mission of securing the happiness of our beloved country and for many years this was the last of the Santome mine what advantage that government had expected from the Spoliation it is impossible to tell now Costa Guana was made with difficulty to pay a beggarly money compensation to the families of the victims and then the matter was dropped out of diplomatic dispatches but afterwards another government be thought itself of that valuable asset it was an ordinary Costa Guana government the fourth in six years but it judged of its opportunities sanely it remembered the Santome mine with a secret conviction of its worthlessness in their own hands but with an ingenious insight into the various uses of silver mine can be put to apart from the sordid process of extracting the metal from under the ground the father of Charles Gould for a long time one of the most wealthy merchants of Costa Guana had already lost a considerable part of his fortune in forced loans to the successive governments he was a man of calm judgment who never dreamed of pressing his claims and when suddenly the perpetual concession of the Santome mine was offered to him in full settlement his alarm became extreme he was versed in the ways of governments indeed the intention of this affair though no doubt deeply meditated in the closet lay open on the surface of the document presented urgently for his signature the third and most important clause stipulated that the concession holders should pay at once to the government five years royalties on the estimated output of the mine Mr. Gould, senior defended himself from this fatal favor with many arguments and entreaties but without success he knew nothing of mining he had no means to put his concession on the European market the mine as a working concern did not exist the buildings had been burnt down the mining plant had been destroyed the mining population had disappeared from the neighborhood years and years ago the very road had vanished under a flood of tropical vegetation as effectually as if swallowed by the sea and the main gallery had fallen within a hundred yards from the entrance it was no longer an abandoned mine it was a wild, inaccessible and rocky gorge of the Sierra where vestiges of charred timber some heaps of smashed bricks and a few shapeless pieces of rusty iron could have been found under the matted mass of thorny creepers covering the ground Mr. Gould, senior did not desire the perpetual possession of that desolate locality in fact, the mere vision of it arising before his mind in the still watches of the night had the power to exasperate him into hours of hot and agitated insomnia it so happened, however that the finance minister of the time was a man to whom, in years gone by Mr. Gould had, unfortunately declined to grant some small pecuniary assistance facing his refusal on the ground that the applicant was a notorious gambler and cheat, besides being more than half suspected of a robbery with violence on a wealthy ranchero in a remote country district where he was actually exercising the function of a judge now after reaching his exalted position, that politician had proclaimed his intention to repay evil with good to senior Gould, the poor man he affirmed and reaffirmed this resolution in the drawing rooms of Santa Marta in a soft and implacable voice and with such malicious glances that Mr. Gould's best friends advised him earnestly to attempt no bribery to get the matter dropped it would have been useless indeed, it would not have been a very safe proceeding such was also the opinion of a stout loud-voiced lady of French extraction the daughter, she said of an officer of high rank officier supérieur de l'armée who was accommodated with lodgings within the walls of a secularized convent next door to the ministry of finance that florid person when approached on behalf of Mr. Gould in a proper manner and with a suitable present shook her head despondently she was good-natured and her despondency was genuine she imagined she could not take money in consideration of something she could not accomplish the friend of Mr. Gould charged with the delicate mission used to say afterwards that she was the only honest person closely or remotely connected with the government he had ever met no go, she had said with a cavalier husky intonation which was natural to her and using terms of expression more suitable to a child of parents unknown than to the orphaned daughter of a general officer no, it's no go pas moyen, mon garçon c'est dommage, tout de même ah zut, je ne vole pas mon monde je ne suis pas ministre moi vous pouvez emporter votre petit sac for a moment for a moment biting her carmine lip she deplored inwardly the tyranny of the rigid principles governing the sale of her influence in high places then significantly and with a touch of impatience allez, she added after such a warning there was nothing for it but to sign and pay Mr. Gould had swallowed the pill and it was as though it had been compounded of some subtle poison that acted directly on his brain he became at once mine ridden and as he was well read in light literature it took to his mind the form of the old man of the sea fastened upon his shoulders he also began to dream of vampires Mr. Gould exaggerated to himself the disadvantages of his new position because he viewed it emotionally his position in Costa Guana was no worse than before but man is a desperately conservative creature and the extravagant novelty of this outrage upon his purse distressed his sensibilities everybody around him was being robbed by the grotesque and murderous bands that played their game of governments and revolutions after the death of Guzman Bento his experience had taught him that however short the plunder might fall of their legitimate expectations no gang in possession of the presidential palace would be so incompetent as to suffer itself to be baffled by the want of a pretext the first casual colonel of the barefooted army of scarecrows that came along was able to expose with force and precision to any mere civilian his titles to a sum of ten thousand dollars the while his hope would be immutably fixed upon a gratuity at any rate of no less than a thousand Mr. Gould knew that very well and armed with resignation had waited for better times to be robbed under the forms of legality and business was intolerable to his imagination Mr. Gould, the father had one fault in his sagacious and honorable character he attached too much importance to form it is a failing common to mankind whose views are tinged by prejudices there was for him in that affair a malignancy of perverted justice which by means of a moral shock attacked his vigorous physique it will end by killing me he used to affirm many times a day and in fact since that time he began to suffer from fever from liver pains and mostly from a worrying inability to think of anything else the finance minister could have formed no conception of the profound subtlety of his revenge even Mr. Gould's letters to his fourteen year old boy Charles then away in England for his education came at last to talk of practically nothing but the mind he groaned over the injustice the persecution the outrage of that mind he occupied whole pages in the exposition of the fatal consequences attaching to the possession of that mind from every point of view with every dismal inference with words of horror at the apparently eternal character of that curse for the concession had been granted to him and his descendants forever he implored his son never to return to Costa Guana never to claim any part of his inheritance there because it was tainted by the infamous concession never to touch it never to approach it to forget that America existed and pursue a mercantile career in Europe and each letter ended with bitter self-reproaches for having stayed too long in that cavern of thieves intrigers and brigands end of part first part six part one