Orakel Classics
Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard
Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard by Joseph Conrad, prepared as a public-domain Orakel edition with 32 chapter-aware companion links.
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PART FIRST THE SILVER OF THE MINE
PART FIRST THE SILVER OF THE MINE from Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. This section is available as a chapter-aware Orakel companion.
Open2CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER ONE from Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. In the time of Spanish rule, and for many years afterwards, the town of Sulaco--the luxuriant beauty of the orange gardens bears witness to its antiquity--had never been commercially anything more important than a coasting port with a fairly large local trade in ox-hides and indigo. The clumsy deep-sea galleons of the conquerors that, needing a brisk gale to move at all, would lie becalmed, where your modern ship
Open3CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER TWO from Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. The only sign of commercial activity within the harbour, visible from the beach of the Great Isabel, is the square blunt end of the wooden jetty which the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company (the O.S.N. of familiar speech) had thrown over the shallow part of the bay soon after they had resolved to make of Sulaco one of their ports of call for the Republic of Costaguana. The State possesses several harbours on its long
Open4CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER THREE from Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. It might have been said that there he was only protecting his own. From the first he had been admitted to live in the intimacy of the family of the hotel-keeper who was a countryman of his. Old Giorgio Viola, a Genoese with a shaggy white leonine head--often called simply “the Garibaldino” (as Mohammedans are called after their prophet)--was, to use Captain Mitchell’s own words, the “respectable married friend” by
Open5CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FOUR from Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. All the morning Nostromo had kept his eye from afar on the Casa Viola, even in the thick of the hottest scrimmage near the Custom House. “If I see smoke rising over there,” he thought to himself, “they are lost.” Directly the mob had broken he pressed with a small band of Italian workmen in that direction, which, indeed, was the shortest line towards the town. That part of the rabble he was pursuing seemed to think
Open6CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER FIVE from Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. In this way only was the power of the local authorities vindicated amongst the great body of strong-limbed foreigners who dug the earth, blasted the rocks, drove the engines for the “progressive and patriotic undertaking.” In these very words eighteen months before the Excellentissimo Senor don Vincente Ribiera, the Dictator of Costaguana, had described the National Central Railway in his great speech at the turning
Open7CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SIX from Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. At that time Nostromo had been already long enough in the country to raise to the highest pitch Captain Mitchell’s opinion of the extraordinary value of his discovery. Clearly he was one of those invaluable subordinates whom to possess is a legitimate cause of boasting. Captain Mitchell plumed himself upon his eye for men--but he was not selfish--and in the innocence of his pride was already developing that mania
Open8CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER SEVEN from Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. Mrs. Gould was too intelligently sympathetic not to share that feeling. It made life exciting, and she was too much of a woman not to like excitement. But it frightened her, too, a little; and when Don Jose Avellanos, rocking in the American chair, would go so far as to say, “Even, my dear Carlos, if you had failed; even if some untoward event were yet to destroy your work--which God forbid!--you would have deserved
Open9CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER EIGHT from Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. Those of us whom business or curiosity took to Sulaco in these years before the first advent of the railway can remember the steadying effect of the San Tome mine upon the life of that remote province. The outward appearances had not changed then as they have changed since, as I am told, with cable cars running along the streets of the Constitution, and carriage roads far into the country, to Rincon and other
Open10PART SECOND THE ISABELS
PART SECOND THE ISABELS from Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. This section is available as a chapter-aware Orakel companion.
Open11CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER ONE from Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. Through good and evil report in the varying fortune of 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
Open12CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER TWO from Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. After another armed struggle, decided by Montero’s victory of Rio Seco, had been added to the tale of civil wars, the “honest men,” as Don Jose called them, could breathe freely for the first time in half a century. The Five-Year-Mandate law became the basis of that regeneration, the passionate desire and hope for which had been like the elixir of everlasting youth for Don Jose
Open13CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER THREE from Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. When General Barrios stopped to address Mrs. Gould, Antonia raised negligently her hand holding an open fan, as if to shade from the sun her head, wrapped in a light lace shawl. The clear gleam of her blue eyes gliding behind the black fringe of eyelashes paused for a moment upon her father, then travelled further to the figure of a young man of thirty at most, of medium height, rather thick-set, wearing a light
Open14CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FOUR from Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. Perhaps it was in the exercise of his calling that he had come to see the troops depart. The Porvenir of the day after next would no doubt relate the event, but its editor, leaning his side against the landau, seemed to look at nothing. The front rank of the company of infantry drawn up three deep across the shore end of the jetty when pressed too close would bring their bayonets to the charge ferociously, with an
Open15CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER FIVE from Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. The Gould carriage was the first to return from the harbour to the empty town. On the ancient pavement, laid out in patterns, sunk into ruts and holes, the portly Ignacio, mindful of the springs of the Parisian-built landau, had pulled up to a walk, and Decoud in his corner contemplated moodily the inner aspect of the gate. The squat turreted sides held up between them a mass of masonry with bunches of grass growing
Open16CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SIX from Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. A profound stillness reigned in the Casa Gould. The master of the house, walking along the corredor, opened the door of his room, and saw his wife sitting in a big armchair--his own smoking armchair--thoughtful, contemplating her little shoes. And she did not raise her eyes when he walked
Open17CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER SEVEN from Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. It was part of what Decoud would have called his sane materialism that he did not believe in the possibility of friendship between man and
Open18CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER EIGHT from Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. For a moment, before this extraordinary find, they forgot their own concerns and sensations. Senor Hirsch’s sensations as he lay there must have been those of extreme terror. For a long time he refused to give a sign of life, till at last Decoud’s objurgations, and, perhaps more, Nostromo’s impatient suggestion that he should be thrown overboard, as he seemed to be dead, induced him to raise one eyelid first, and
Open19PART THIRD THE LIGHTHOUSE
PART THIRD THE LIGHTHOUSE from Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. This section is available as a chapter-aware Orakel companion.
Open20CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER ONE from Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. Directly the cargo boat had slipped away from the wharf and got lost in the darkness of the harbour the Europeans of Sulaco separated, to prepare for the coming of the Monterist regime, which was approaching Sulaco from the mountains, as well as from the
Open21CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER TWO from Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. Captain Mitchell, pacing the wharf, was asking himself the same question. There was always the doubt whether the warning of the Esmeralda telegraphist--a fragmentary and interrupted message--had been properly understood. However, the good man had made up his mind not to go to bed till daylight, if even then. He imagined himself to have rendered an enormous service to Charles Gould. When he thought of the saved
Open22CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER THREE from Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. Directly they were alone, the colonel’s severe official manner changed. He rose and approached the doctor. His eyes shone with rapacity and hope; he became confidential. “The silver might have been indeed put on board the lighter, but it was not conceivable that it should have been taken out to sea.” The doctor, watching every word, nodded slightly, smoking with apparent relish the cigar which Sotillo had offered
Open23CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FOUR from Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. Charles Gould turned towards the town. Before him the jagged peaks of the Sierra came out all black in the clear dawn. Here and there a muffled lepero whisked round the corner of a grass-grown street before the ringing hoofs of his horse. Dogs barked behind the walls of the gardens; and with the colourless light the chill of the snows seemed to fall from the mountains upon the disjointed pavements and the shuttered
Open24CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER FIVE from Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. During the night the expectant populace had taken possession of all the belfries in the town in order to welcome Pedrito Montero, who was making his entry after having slept the night in Rincon. And first came straggling in through the land gate the armed mob of all colours, complexions, types, and states of raggedness, calling themselves the Sulaco National Guard, and commanded by Senor Gamacho. Through the middle
Open25CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SIX from Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. The declining sun had shifted the shadows from west to east 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 crouching 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
Open26CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER SEVEN from Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. At about that time, in the Intendencia of Sulaco, Charles Gould was assuring Pedrito Montero, who had sent a request for his presence there, that he would never let the mine pass out of his hands for the profit of a Government who had robbed him of it. The Gould Concession could not be resumed. His father had not desired it. The son would never surrender it. He would never surrender it alive. And once dead, where
Open27CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER EIGHT from Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. After landing from his swim Nostromo had scrambled up, all dripping, into the main quadrangle of the old fort; and there, amongst ruined bits of walls and rotting remnants of roofs and sheds, he had slept the day through. He had slept in the shadow of the mountains, in the white blaze of noon, in the stillness and solitude of that overgrown piece of land between the oval of the harbour and the spacious semi-circle
Open28CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER NINE from Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. Distracted between doubts and hopes, dismayed by the sound of bells pealing out the arrival of Pedrito Montero, Sotillo had spent the morning in battling with his thoughts; a contest to which he was unequal, from the vacuity of his mind and the violence of his passions. Disappointment, greed, anger, and fear made a tumult, in the colonel’s breast louder than the din of bells in the town. Nothing he had planned had
Open29CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER TEN from Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. The next day was quiet in the morning, except for the faint sound of firing to the northward, in the direction of Los Hatos. Captain Mitchell had listened to it from his balcony anxiously. The phrase, “In my delicate position as the only consular agent then in the port, everything, sir, everything was a just cause for anxiety,” had its place in the more or less stereotyped relation of the “historical events” which
Open30CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN from Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. Sulaco outstripped Nostromo’s prudence, growing rich swiftly on the hidden treasures of the earth, hovered over by the anxious spirits of good and evil, torn out by the labouring hands of the people. It was like a second youth, like a new life, full of promise, of unrest, of toil, scattering lavishly its wealth to the four corners of an excited world. Material changes swept along in the train of material interests.
Open31CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER TWELVE from Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. Nostromo had been growing rich very slowly. It was an effect of his prudence. He could command himself even when thrown off his balance. And to become the slave of a treasure with full self-knowledge is an occurrence rare and mentally disturbing. But it was also in a great part because of the difficulty of converting it into a form in which it could become available. The mere act of getting it away from the island
Open32CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER THIRTEEN from Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. On the day Mrs. Gould was going, in Dr. Monygham’s words, to “give a tertulia,” Captain Fidanza went down the side of his schooner lying in Sulaco harbour, calm, unbending, deliberate in the way he sat down in his dinghy and took up his sculls. He was later than usual. The afternoon was well advanced before he landed on the beach of the Great Isabel, and with a steady pace climbed the slope of the
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