Page 127 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

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 re-
mind 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 water-
fall, with its amazing fernery, like a hanging garden above
the rocks of the gorge, was preserved in Mrs. Gould’s wa-
ter-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 clear-
ing 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 excite-

1 Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard