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

to make room for the foreign senora and their worships theCaballeros. All he asked Charles Gould (whom he took fora mysterious and official person) to do for him was to remindthe supreme Government—El Gobierno supreme—ofa pension (amounting to about a dollar a month) to whichhe believed himself entitled. It had been promised to him,he affirmed, straightening his bent back martially, ‘manyyears ago, for my valour in the wars with the wild Indioswhen a young man, senor.’The waterfall existed no longer. The tree-ferns that hadluxuriated in its spray had died around the dried-up pool,and the high ravine was only a big trench half filled up withthe refuse of excavations and tailings. The torrent, dammedup above, sent its water rushing along the open flumes ofscooped tree trunks striding on trestle-legs to the turbinesworking the stamps on the lower plateau—the mesa grandeof the San Tome mountain. Only the memory of the waterfall,with its amazing fernery, like a hanging garden abovethe rocks of the gorge, was preserved in Mrs. Gould’s water-coloursketch; she had made it hastily one day from acleared patch in the bushes, sitting in the shade of a roof ofstraw erected for her on three rough poles under Don Pepe’sdirection.Mrs. Gould had seen it all from the beginning: the clearingof the wilderness, the making of the road, the cutting ofnew paths up the cliff face of San Tome. For weeks togethershe had lived on the spot with her husband; and she was solittle in Sulaco during that year that the appearance of theGould carriage on the Alameda would cause a social excite-