Page 158 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

The harbour was busy, too, with the traffic in railway ma-
terial, and with the movements of troops along the coast.
The O.S.N. Company found much occupation for its fleet.
Costaguana had no navy, and, apart from a few coastguard
cutters, there were no national ships except a couple of old
merchant steamers used as transports.
Captain Mitchell, feeling more and more in the thick
of history, found time for an hour or so during an after-
noon in the drawing-room of the Casa Gould, where, with a
strange ignorance of the real forces at work around him, he
professed himself delighted to get away from the strain of
affairs. He did not know what he would have done without
his invaluable Nostromo, he declared. Those confounded
Costaguana politics gave him more work—he confided to
Mrs. Gould—than he had bargained for.
Don Jose Avellanos had displayed in the service of the
endangered Ribiera Government an organizing activity
and an eloquence of which the echoes reached even Eu-
rope. For, after the new loan to the Ribiera Government,
Europe had become interested in Costaguana. The Sala of
the Provincial Assembly (in the Municipal Buildings of Su-
laco), with its portraits of the Liberators on the walls and an
old flag of Cortez preserved in a glass case above the Pres-
ident’s chair, had heard all these speeches—the early one
containing the impassioned declaration ‘Militarism is the
enemy,’ the famous one of the ‘trembling balance’ delivered
on the occasion of the vote for the raising of a second Su-
laco regiment in the defence of the reforming Government;
and when the provinces again displayed their old flags (pro-

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