Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

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

She bore a whole two months of wandering very well; she had that
power of resistance to fatigue which one discovers here and there
in some quite frail-looking women with surprise--like a state of
possession by a remarkably stubborn spirit. Don Pepe--the old
Costaguana major--after much display of solicitude for the
delicate lady, had ended by conferring upon her the name of the
"Never-tired Senora." Mrs. Gould was indeed becoming a
Costaguanera. Having acquired in Southern Europe a knowledge of
true peasantry, she was able to appreciate the great worth of the
people. She saw the man under the silent, sad-eyed beast of
burden. She saw them on the road carrying loads, lonely figures
upon the plain, toiling under great straw hats, with their white
clothing flapping about their limbs in the wind; she remembered
the villages by some group of Indian women at the fountain
impressed upon her memory, by the face of some young Indian girl
with a melancholy and sensual profile, raising an earthenware
vessel of cool water at the door of a dark hut with a wooden
porch cumbered with great brown jars. The solid wooden wheels of
an ox-cart, halted with its shafts in the dust, showed the
strokes of the axe; and a party of charcoal carriers, with each
man's load resting above his head on the top of the low mud wall,
slept stretched in a row within the strip of shade.

The heavy stonework of bridges and churches left by the
conquerors proclaimed the disregard of human labour, the
tribute-labour of vanished nations. The power of king and church
was gone, but at the sight of some heavy ruinous pile overtopping
from a knoll the low mud walls of a village, Don Pepe would
interrupt the tale of his campaigns to exclaim--

"Poor Costaguana! Before, it was everything for the Padres,
nothing for the people; and now it is everything for those great
politicos in Sta. Marta, for negroes and thieves."