en like me he
would have been a man."

He turned his horse slowly, and paced on between the booths, checking
the mare almost to a standstill now and then for children, for the
groups of people from the distant Campo, who stared after him with
admiration. The Company's lightermen saluted him from afar; and the
greatly envied Capataz de Cargadores advanced, amongst murmurs of
recognition and obsequious greetings, towards the huge circus-like
erection. The throng thickened; the guitars tinkled louder; other
horsemen sat motionless, smoking calmly above the heads of the crowd; it
eddied and pushed before the doors of the high-roofed building, whence
issued a shuffle and thumping of feet in time to the dance music
vibrating and shrieking with a racking rhythm, overhung by the
tremendous, sustained, hollow roar of the gombo. The barbarous and
imposing noise of the big drum, that can madden a crowd, and that even
Europeans cannot hear without a strange emotion, seemed to draw Nostromo
on to its source, while a man, wrapped up in a faded, torn poncho,
walked by his stirrup, and, buffeted right and left, begged "his
worship" insistently for employment on the wharf. He whined, offering
the Senor Capataz half his daily pay for the privilege of being admitted
to the swaggering fraternity of Cargadores; the other half would
be enough for him, he protested. But Captain Mitchell's right-hand
man--"invaluable for our work--a perfectly incorruptible fellow"--after
looking down critically at the ragged mozo, shook his head without a
word in the uproar going on around.

The man fell back; and a little further on Nostromo had to pull up. From
the doors of the dance hall men and women emerged tottering, streaming
with sweat, trembling in every limb, to lean, panting, with staring eyes
and parted lips, against the wall of the structure, where the harps
and guitars played on with mad speed in an incessant roll of thunder.
Hundreds of hands clapped in there; voices shrieked, and then all at
once would sink low, chanting in unison the refrain of a love song, with
a dying fall. A red flower, flung with a good aim from somewhere in the
crowd, struck the resplendent Capataz on the cheek.

He caught it as it fell, neatly, but for some time did not turn his
head. When at last he condescended to look round, the throng near him
had parted to make way for a pretty Morenita, her hair held up by a
small golden comb, who was walking towards him in the