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

CHAPTER ONETHROUGH good and evil report in the varying fortuneof that struggle which Don Jose had characterized in thephrase, ‘the fate of national honesty trembles in the balance,’the Gould Concession, ‘Imperium in Imperio,’ had goneon working; the square mountain had gone on pouring itstreasure down the wooden shoots to the unresting batteriesof stamps; the lights of San Tome had twinkled night afternight upon the great, limitless shadow of the Campo; everythree months the silver escort had gone down to the sea asif neither the war nor its consequences could ever affect theancient Occidental State secluded beyond its high barrierof the Cordillera. All the fighting took place on the otherside of that mighty wall of serrated peaks lorded over by thewhite dome of Higuerota and as yet unbreached by the railway,of which only the first part, the easy Campo part fromSulaco to the Ivie Valley at the foot of the pass, had beenlaid. Neither did the telegraph line cross the mountains yet;its poles, like slender beacons on the plain, penetrated intothe forest fringe of the foot-hills cut by the deep avenue ofthe track; and its wire ended abruptly in the constructioncamp at a white deal table supporting a Morse apparatus, ina long hut of planks with a corrugated iron roof overshadowedby gigantic cedar trees—the quarters of the engineerin charge of the advance section.