Nostromo

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

... This is the peninsula of Azuera, a wild chaos of sharp rocks and 
stony levels cut about by vertical ravines.  It lies far out to sea 
like a rough head of stone stretched from a green-clad coast at the 
end of a slender neck of sand covered with thickets of thorny scrub. 
Utterly waterless, for the rainfall runs off at once on all sides 
into the sea, it has not soil enough -- it is said -- to grow a 
single blade of grass, as if it were blighted by a curse.  The poor, 
associating by an obscure instinct of consolation the ideas of evil 
and wealth, will tell you that it is deadly because of its forbidden 
treasures.  The common folk of the neighbourhood, peons of the 
estancias, vaqueros of the seaboard plains, tame Indians coming miles 
to market with a bundle of sugar-cane or a basket of maize worth 
about threepence, are well aware that heaps of shining gold lie in 
the gloom of the deep precipices cleaving the stony levels of Azuera. 
Tradition has it that many adventurers of olden time had perished in 
the search.  The story goes also that within men's memory two 
wandering sailors -- Americanos, perhaps, but gringos of some sort 
for certain -- talked over a gambling, good-for-nothing mozo, and the 
three stole a donkey to carry for them a bundle of dry sticks, a 
water-skin, and provisions enough to last a few days.  Thus 
accompanied, and with revolvers at their belts, they had started to 
chop their way with machetes through the thorny scrub on the neck of 
the peninsula.

On the second evening an upright spiral of smoke (it could only have 
been from their camp-fire) was seen for the first time within memory 
of man standing up faintly upon the sky above a razor-backed ridge on 
the stony head.  The crew of a coasting schooner, lying becalmed 
three miles off the shore, stared at it with amazement till dark.  A 
negro fisherman, living in a lonely hut in a little bay near by, had 
seen the start and was on the lookout for some sign.  He called to 
his wife just as the sun was about to set.  They had watched the 
strange portent with envy, incredulity, and awe.

The impious adventurers gave no other sign.  The sailors, the Indian, 
and the stolen burro were never seen again.  As to the mozo, a Sulaco 
man -- his wife paid for some masses, and the poor four-footed beast, 
being without sin, had been probably permitted to die; but the two 
gringos, spectral and alive, are believed to be dwelling to this day 
amongst the rocks, under the fatal spell of their success.  Their 
souls cannot tear themselves away from their bodies mounting guard 
over the discovered treasure.  They are now rich and hungry and 
thirsty -- a strange theory of tenacious gringo ghosts suffering in 
their starved and parched flesh of defiant heretics, where a 
Christian would have renounced and been released.

These, then, are the legendary inhabitants of Azuera guarding its 
forbidden wealth....

(Joseph Conrad, _Nostromo_, Part 1 "The Silver of the Mine," Chapter 1)
-- 
Yoshie

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