Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

PART THIRD: THE LIGHTHOUSE 10. CHAPTER TEN (continued)

He rose a little stiffly, and the drive to Rincon would be taken
with only one philosophical remark, uttered by the merciless
cicerone, with his eyes fixed upon the lights of San Tome, that
seemed suspended in the dark night between earth and heaven.

"A great power, this, for good and evil, sir. A great power."

And the dinner of the Mirliflores would be eaten, excellent as to
cooking, and leaving upon the traveller's mind an impression that
there were in Sulaco many pleasant, able young men with salaries
apparently too large for their discretion, and amongst them a
few, mostly Anglo-Saxon, skilled in the art of, as the saying is,
"taking a rise" out of his kind host.

With a rapid, jingling drive to the harbour in a twowheeled
machine (which Captain Mitchell called a curricle) behind a fleet
and scraggy mule beaten all the time by an obviously Neapolitan
driver, the cycle would be nearly closed before the lighted-up
offices of the O. S. N. Company, remaining open so late because
of the steamer. Nearly--but not quite.

"Ten o'clock. Your ship won't be ready to leave till half-past
twelve, if by then. Come in for a brandy-and-soda and one more
cigar."

And in the superintendent's private room the privileged passenger
by the Ceres, or Juno, or Pallas, stunned and as it were
annihilated mentally by a sudden surfeit of sights, sounds,
names, facts, and complicated information imperfectly
apprehended, would listen like a tired child to a fairy tale;
would hear a voice, familiar and surprising in its pompousness,
tell him, as if from another world, how there was "in this very
harbour" an international naval demonstration, which put an end
to the Costaguana-Sulaco War. How the United States cruiser,
Powhattan, was the first to salute the Occidental flag--white,
with a wreath of green laurel in the middle encircling a yellow
amarilla flower. Would hear how General Montero, in less than a
month after proclaiming himself Emperor of Costaguana, was shot
dead (during a solemn and public distribution of orders and
crosses) by a young artillery officer, the brother of his then
mistress.