Nostromo - A Tale of the Seaboard.pdf - Planet eBook

each across the broad potreros. A spreading cotton-wooltree shaded a thatched ranche by the road; the trudging filesof burdened Indians taking off their hats, would lift sad,mute eyes to the cavalcade raising the dust of the crumblingcamino real made by the hands of their enslaved forefathers.And Mrs. Gould, with each day’s journey, seemed to comenearer to the soul of the land in the tremendous disclosureof this interior unaffected by the slight European veneer ofthe coast towns, a great land of plain and mountain andpeople, suffering and mute, waiting for the future in a patheticimmobility of patience.She knew its sights and its hospitality, dispensed with asort of slumbrous dignity in those great houses presentinglong, blind walls and heavy portals to the wind-swept pastures.She was given the head of the tables, where mastersand dependants sat in a simple and patriarchal state. Theladies of the house would talk softly in the moonlight underthe orange trees of the courtyards, impressing upon her thesweetness of their voices and the something mysterious inthe quietude of their lives. In the morning the gentlemen,well mounted in braided sombreros and embroidered ridingsuits, with much silver on the trappings of their horses,would ride forth to escort the departing guests before committingthem, with grave good-byes, to the care of God atthe boundary pillars of their estates. In all these householdsshe could hear stories of political outrage; friends, relatives,ruined, imprisoned, killed in the battles of senseless civilwars, barbarously executed in ferocious proscriptions, asthough the government of the country had been a struggle