Page 232 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

sign, made no sound. The impenetrability of the embod-
ied Gould Concession had its surface shades. To be dumb is
merely a fatal affliction; but the King of Sulaco had words
enough to give him all the mysterious weight of a taciturn
force. His silences, backed by the power of speech, had as
many shades of significance as uttered words in the way
of assent, of doubt, of negation—even of simple comment.
Some seemed to say plainly, ‘Think it over”; others meant
clearly, ‘Go ahead”; a simple, low ‘I see,’ with an affirma-
tive nod, at the end of a patient listening half-hour was the
equivalent of a verbal contract, which men had learned to
trust implicitly, since behind it all there was the great San
Tome mine, the head and front of the material interests, so
strong that it depended on no man’s goodwill in the whole
length and breadth of the Occidental Province—that is, on
no goodwill which it could not buy ten times over. But to
the little hook-nosed man from Esmeralda, anxious about
the export of hides, the silence of Charles Gould portended
a failure. Evidently this was no time for extending a modest
man’s business. He enveloped in a swift mental maledic-
tion the whole country, with all its inhabitants, partisans
of Ribiera and Montero alike; and there were incipient
tears in his mute anger at the thought of the innumerable
ox-hides going to waste upon the dreamy expanse of the
Campo, with its single palms rising like ships at sea within
the perfect circle of the horizon, its clumps of heavy tim-
ber motionless like solid islands of leaves above the running
waves of grass. There were hides there, rotting, with no
profit to anybody—rotting where they had been dropped by

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