Page 154 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

Nostromo, the Mediterranean sailor come ashore casu-
ally to try his luck in Costaguana, rode slowly towards
the harbour. The Juno was just then swinging round; and
even as Nostromo reined up again to look on, a flag ran up
on the improvised flagstaff erected in an ancient and dis-
mantled little fort at the harbour entrance. Half a battery
of field guns had been hurried over there from the Sula-
co barracks for the purpose of firing the regulation salutes
for the President-Dictator and the War Minister. As the
mail-boat headed through the pass, the badly timed reports
announced the end of Don Vincente Ribiera’s first official
visit to Sulaco, and for Captain Mitchell the end of another
‘historic occasion.’ Next time when the ‘Hope of honest men’
was to come that way, a year and a half later, it was unoffi-
cially, over the mountain tracks, fleeing after a defeat on a
lame mule, to be only just saved by Nostromo from an igno-
minious death at the hands of a mob. It was a very different
event, of which Captain Mitchell used to say—
‘It was history—history, sir! And that fellow of mine,
Nostromo, you know, was right in it. Absolutely making
history, sir.’
But this event, creditable to Nostromo, was to lead im-
mediately to another, which could not be classed either as
‘history’ or as ‘a mistake’ in Captain Mitchell’s phraseology.
He had another word for it.
‘Sir’ he used to say afterwards, ‘that was no mistake. It
was a fatality. A misfortune, pure and simple, sir. And that
poor fellow of mine was right in it—right in the middle of
it! A fatality, if ever there was one—and to my mind he has

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