Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

PART FIRST: THE SILVER OF THE MINE 8. CHAPTER EIGHT (continued)

And then they had wheeled their horses and ridden back to sleep
that night at Rincon. The alcalde--an old, skinny Moreno, a
sergeant of Guzman Bento's time--had cleared respectfully out of
his house with his three pretty daughters, to make room for the
foreign senora and their worships the Caballeros. All he asked
Charles Gould (whom he took for a mysterious and official person)
to do for him was to remind the supreme Government--El Gobierno
supreme--of a pension (amounting to about a dollar a month) to
which he believed himself entitled. It had been promised to him,
he affirmed, straightening his bent back martially, "many years
ago, for my valour in the wars with the wild Indios when a young
man, senor."

The waterfall existed no longer. The tree-ferns that had
luxuriated in its spray had died around the dried-up pool, and
the high ravine was only a big trench half filled up with the
refuse of excavations and tailings. The torrent, dammed up
above, sent its water rushing along the open flumes of scooped
tree trunks striding on trestle-legs to the turbines working the
stamps on the lower plateau--the mesa grande of the San Tome
mountain. Only the memory of the waterfall, with its amazing
fernery, like a hanging garden above the rocks of the gorge, was
preserved in Mrs. Gould's water-colour sketch; she had made it
hastily one day from a cleared patch in the bushes, sitting in
the shade of a roof of straw erected for her on three rough poles
under Don Pepe's direction.

Mrs. Gould had seen it all from the beginning: the clearing of
the wilderness, the making of the road, the cutting of new paths
up the cliff face of San Tome. For weeks together she had lived
on the spot with her husband; and she was so little in Sulaco
during that year that the appearance of the Gould carriage on the
Alameda would cause a social excitement. From the heavy family
coaches full of stately senoras and black-eyed senoritas rolling
solemnly in the shaded alley white hands were waved towards her
with animation in a flutter of greetings. Dona Emilia was "down
from the mountain."