Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

PART FIRST: THE SILVER OF THE MINE 1. CHAPTER ONE (continued)

That last is no more than a foot high, and about seven paces
across, a mere flat top of a grey rock which smokes like a hot
cinder after a shower, and where no man would care to venture a
naked sole before sunset. On the Little Isabel an old ragged
palm, with a thick bulging trunk rough with spines, a very witch
amongst palm trees, rustles a dismal bunch of dead leaves above
the coarse sand. The Great Isabel has a spring of fresh water
issuing from the overgrown side of a ravine. Resembling an
emerald green wedge of land a mile long, and laid flat upon the
sea, it bears two forest trees standing close together, with a
wide spread of shade at the foot of their smooth trunks. A ravine
extending the whole length of the island is full of bushes; and
presenting a deep tangled cleft on the high side spreads itself
out on the other into a shallow depression abutting on a small
strip of sandy shore.

From that low end of the Great Isabel the eye plunges through an
opening two miles away, as abrupt as if chopped with an axe out
of the regular sweep of the coast, right into the harbour of
Sulaco. It is an oblong, lake-like piece of water. On one side
the short wooded spurs and valleys of the Cordillera come down at
right angles to the very strand; on the other the open view of
the great Sulaco plain passes into the opal mystery of great
distances overhung by dry haze. The town of Sulaco itself--tops
of walls, a great cupola, gleams of white miradors in a vast
grove of orange trees--lies between the mountains and the plain,
at some little distance from its harbour and out of the direct
line of sight from the sea.