Page 157 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

CHAPTER ONE

HROUGH good and evil report in the varying fortune
Tof that struggle which Don Jose had characterized in the
phrase, ‘the fate of national honesty trembles in the balance,’
the Gould Concession, ‘Imperium in Imperio,’ had gone
on working; the square mountain had gone on pouring its
treasure down the wooden shoots to the unresting batteries
of stamps; the lights of San Tome had twinkled night after
night upon the great, limitless shadow of the Campo; every
three months the silver escort had gone down to the sea as
if neither the war nor its consequences could ever affect the
ancient Occidental State secluded beyond its high barrier
of the Cordillera. All the fighting took place on the other
side of that mighty wall of serrated peaks lorded over by the
white dome of Higuerota and as yet unbreached by the rail-
way, of which only the first part, the easy Campo part from
Sulaco to the Ivie Valley at the foot of the pass, had been
laid. Neither did the telegraph line cross the mountains yet;
its poles, like slender beacons on the plain, penetrated into
the forest fringe of the foot-hills cut by the deep avenue of
the track; and its wire ended abruptly in the construction
camp at a white deal table supporting a Morse apparatus, in
a long hut of planks with a corrugated iron roof overshad-
owed by gigantic cedar trees—the quarters of the engineer
in charge of the advance section.

1 Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard