Page 107 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

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 pa-
thetic 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 pas-
tures. 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 rid-
ing suits, with much silver on the trappings of their horses,
would ride forth to escort the departing guests before com-
mitting 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

10 Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard