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

Nostromo, the Mediterranean sailor come ashore casuallyto try his luck in Costaguana, rode slowly towardsthe harbour. The Juno was just then swinging round; andeven as Nostromo reined up again to look on, a flag ran upon the improvised flagstaff erected in an ancient and dismantledlittle fort at the harbour entrance. Half a batteryof field guns had been hurried over there from the Sulacobarracks for the purpose of firing the regulation salutesfor the President-Dictator and the War Minister. As themail-boat headed through the pass, the badly timed reportsannounced the end of Don Vincente Ribiera’s first officialvisit to Sulaco, and for Captain Mitchell the end of another‘historic occasion.’ Next time when the ‘Hope of honest men’was to come that way, a year and a half later, it was unofficially,over the mountain tracks, fleeing after a defeat on alame mule, to be only just saved by Nostromo from an ignominiousdeath at the hands of a mob. It was a very differentevent, of which Captain Mitchell used to say—‘It was history—history, sir! And that fellow of mine,Nostromo, you know, was right in it. Absolutely makinghistory, sir.’But this event, creditable to Nostromo, was to lead immediatelyto another, which could not be classed either as‘history’ or as ‘a mistake’ in Captain Mitchell’s phraseology.He had another word for it.‘Sir’ he used to say afterwards, ‘that was no mistake. Itwas a fatality. A misfortune, pure and simple, sir. And thatpoor fellow of mine was right in it—right in the middle ofit! A fatality, if ever there was one—and to my mind he has