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

sign, made no sound. The impenetrability of the embodiedGould Concession had its surface shades. To be dumb ismerely a fatal affliction; but the King of Sulaco had wordsenough to give him all the mysterious weight of a taciturnforce. His silences, backed by the power of speech, had asmany shades of significance as uttered words in the wayof assent, of doubt, of negation—even of simple comment.Some seemed to say plainly, ‘Think it over”; others meantclearly, ‘Go ahead”; a simple, low ‘I see,’ with an affirmativenod, at the end of a patient listening half-hour was theequivalent of a verbal contract, which men had learned totrust implicitly, since behind it all there was the great SanTome mine, the head and front of the material interests, sostrong that it depended on no man’s goodwill in the wholelength and breadth of the Occidental Province—that is, onno goodwill which it could not buy ten times over. But tothe little hook-nosed man from Esmeralda, anxious aboutthe export of hides, the silence of Charles Gould portendeda failure. Evidently this was no time for extending a modestman’s business. He enveloped in a swift mental maledictionthe whole country, with all its inhabitants, partisansof Ribiera and Montero alike; and there were incipienttears in his mute anger at the thought of the innumerableox-hides going to waste upon the dreamy expanse of theCampo, with its single palms rising like ships at sea withinthe perfect circle of the horizon, its clumps of heavy timbermotionless like solid islands of leaves above the runningwaves of grass. There were hides there, rotting, with noprofit to anybody—rotting where they had been dropped by