nd perfectly well
at the time that the moment the breath left the body of the Magnificent
Capataz, the Man of the People, freed at last from the toils of love and
wealth, there was nothing more for me to do in Sulaco.

J. C.

October, 1917.

CONTENTS

PART FIRST THE SILVER OF THE MINE

PART SECOND THE ISABELS

PART THIRD THE LIGHTHOUSE

NOSTROMO

PART FIRST THE SILVER OF THE MINE

CHAPTER ONE

In the time of Spanish rule, and for many years afterwards, the town of
Sulaco--the luxuriant beauty of the orange gardens bears witness to its
antiquity--had never been commercially anything more important than a
coasting port with a fairly large local trade in ox-hides and indigo.
The clumsy deep-sea galleons of the conquerors that, needing a brisk
gale to move at all, would lie becalmed, where your modern ship built on
clipper lines forges ahead by the mere flapping of her sails, had been
barred out of Sulaco by the prevailing calms of its vast gulf. Some
harbours of the earth are made difficult of access by the treachery
of sunken rocks and the tempests of their shores. Sulaco had found an
inviolable sanctuary from the temptations of a trading world in
the solemn hush of the deep Golfo Placido as if within an enormous
semi-circular and unroofed temple open to the ocean, with its walls of
lofty mountains hung with the mourning draperies of cloud.

On one side of this broad curve in the straight seaboard of the Republic
of Costaguana, the last spur of the coast range forms an insignificant
cape whose name is Punta Mala. From the middle of the gulf the point of
the land itself is not visible at all; but the shoulder of a steep hill
at the back can be made out faintly like a shadow on the sky.

On the other side, what seems to be an isolated patch of blue mist
floats lightly on the glare of the horizon. This is the peninsula
of Azuera, a wild chaos of sharp rocks and stony levels cut about by
vertical ravines. It lies far out to sea like a rough head of stone
stretched from a green-clad coast at the end of a slender neck of
sand covered with thickets of thorny scrub. Utterly waterless, for the
rainfall runs off at once on all sides into the sea, it has not soil
enough--it is said--to grow a single blade of grass, as if it were
blighted by a curse. The poor, associating by an obscure instinct of
consolation the ideas of evil and wealth, will tell you that it is
deadly because of its forbi