Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

PART FIRST: THE SILVER OF THE MINE 7. CHAPTER SEVEN (continued)

Men ploughed with wooden ploughs and yoked oxen, small on a
boundless expanse, as if attacking immensity itself. The mounted
figures of vaqueros galloped in the distance, and the great herds
fed with all their horned heads one way, in one single wavering
line as far as eye could reach across the broad potreros. A
spreading cotton-wool tree shaded a thatched ranche by the road;
the trudging files of burdened Indians taking off their hats,
would lift sad, mute eyes to the cavalcade raising the dust of
the crumbling camino real made by the hands of their enslaved
forefathers. And Mrs. Gould, with each day's journey, seemed to
come nearer to the soul of the land in the tremendous disclosure
of this interior unaffected by the slight European veneer of the
coast towns, a great land of plain and mountain and people,
suffering and mute, waiting for the future in a pathetic
immobility of patience.

She knew its sights and its hospitality, dispensed with a sort of
slumbrous dignity in those great houses presenting long, blind
walls and heavy portals to the wind-swept pastures. She was given
the head of the tables, where masters and dependants sat in a
simple and patriarchal state. The ladies of the house would talk
softly in the moonlight under the orange trees of the courtyards,
impressing upon her the sweetness of their voices and the
something mysterious in the quietude of their lives. In the
morning the gentlemen, well mounted in braided sombreros and
embroidered riding suits, with much silver on the trappings of
their horses, would ride forth to escort the departing guests
before committing them, with grave good-byes, to the care of God
at the boundary pillars of their estates. In all these households
she could hear stories of political outrage; friends, relatives,
ruined, imprisoned, killed in the battles of senseless civil
wars, barbarously executed in ferocious proscriptions, as though
the government of the country had been a struggle of lust between
bands of absurd devils let loose upon the land with sabres and
uniforms and grandiloquent phrases. And on all the lips she found
a weary desire for peace, the dread of officialdom with its
nightmarish parody of administration without law, without
security, and without justice.