Page 441 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

CHAPTER SIX

HE declining sun had shifted the shadows from west to
Teast amongst the houses of the town. It had shifted them
upon the whole extent of the immense Campo, with the
white walls of its haciendas on the knolls dominating the
green distances; with its grass-thatched ranches crouch-
ing in the folds of ground by the banks of streams; with
the dark islands of clustered trees on a clear sea of grass,
and the precipitous range of the Cordillera, immense and
motionless, emerging from the billows of the lower forests
like the barren coast of a land of giants. The sunset rays
striking the snow-slope of Higuerota from afar gave it an
air of rosy youth, while the serrated mass of distant peaks
remained black, as if calcined in the fiery radiance. The un-
dulating surface of the forests seemed powdered with pale
gold dust; and away there, beyond Rincon, hidden from the
town by two wooded spurs, the rocks of the San Tome gorge,
with the flat wall of the mountain itself crowned by gigan-
tic ferns, took on warm tones of brown and yellow, with red
rusty streaks, and the dark green clumps of bushes rooted
in crevices. From the plain the stamp sheds and the hous-
es of the mine appeared dark and small, high up, like the
nests of birds clustered on the ledges of a cliff. The zigzag
paths resembled faint tracings scratched on the wall of a
cyclopean blockhouse. To the two serenos of the mine on

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