University of Virginia Library

1. CHAPTER ONE

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 built on clipper
lines forges ahead by the mere flapping of her sails, had
been barred out of Sulaco by the prevailing calms of its
vast gulf. Some harbours of the earth are made difficult
of access by the treachery of sunken rocks and the
tempests of their shores. Sulaco had found an inviolable
sanctuary from the temptations of a trading
world in the solemn hush of the deep Golfo Placido as if
within an enormous semi-circular and unroofed temple
open to the ocean, with its walls of lofty mountains
hung with the mourning draperies of cloud.

On one side of this broad curve in the straight seaboard
of the Republic of Costaguana, the last spur of
the coast range forms an insignificant cape whose name
is Punta Mala. From the middle of the gulf the point
of the land itself is not visible at all; but the shoulder of
a steep hill at the back can be made out faintly like a
shadow on the sky.

On the other side, what seems to be an isolated patch

of blue mist floats lightly on the glare of the horizon.
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; and the shadow on the
sky on one side with the round patch of blue haze
blurring the bright skirt of the horizon on the other,
mark the two outermost points of the bend which bears
the name of Golfo Placido, because never a strong
wind had been known to blow upon its waters.

On crossing the imaginary line drawn from Punta
Mala to Azuera the ships from Europe bound to Sulaco
lose at once the strong breezes of the ocean. They become
the prey of capricious airs that play with them for
thirty hours at a stretch sometimes. Before them the
head of the calm gulf is filled on most days of the year
by a great body of motionless and opaque clouds. On
the rare clear mornings another shadow is cast upon the
sweep of the gulf. The dawn breaks high behind the
towering and serrated wall of the Cordillera, a clear-cut

vision of dark peaks rearing their steep slopes on a lofty
pedestal of forest rising from the very edge of the shore.
Amongst them the white head of Higuerota rises
majestically upon the blue. Bare clusters of enormous
rocks sprinkle with tiny black dots the smooth dome of
snow.

Then, as the midday sun withdraws from the gulf
the shadow of the mountains, the clouds begin to roll
out of the lower valleys. They swathe in sombre
tatters the naked crags of precipices above the wooded
slopes, hide the peaks, smoke in stormy trails across the
snows of Higuerota. The Cordillera is gone from you
as if it had dissolved itself into great piles of grey and
black vapours that travel out slowly to seaward and
vanish into thin air all along the front before the blazing
heat of the day. The wasting edge of the cloud-bank
always strives for, but seldom wins, the middle of the
gulf. The sun — as the sailors say — is eating it up.
Unless perchance a sombre thunder-head breaks away
from the main body to career all over the gulf till it
escapes into the offing beyond Azuera, where it bursts
suddenly into flame and crashes like a sinster pirate-
ship of the air, hove-to above the horizon, engaging the
sea.

At night the body of clouds advancing higher up
the sky smothers the whole quiet gulf below with an
impenetrable darkness, in which the sound of the falling
showers can be heard beginning and ceasing abruptly —
now here, now there. Indeed, these cloudy nights are
proverbial with the seamen along the whole west coast
of a great continent. Sky, land, and sea disappear
together out of the world when the Placido — as the saying
is — goes to sleep under its black poncho. The few
stars left below the seaward frown of the vault shine
feebly as into the mouth of a black cavern. In its

vastness your ship floats unseen under your feet, her
sails flutter invisible above your head. The eye of God
Himself — they add with grim profanity — could not
find out what work a man's hand is doing in there; and
you would be free to call the devil to your aid with
impunity if even his malice were not defeated by such a
blind darkness.

The shores on the gulf are steep-to all round; three uninhabited
islets basking in the sunshine just outside the
cloud veil, and opposite the entrance to the harbour of
Sulaco, bear the name of "The Isabels."

There is the Great Isabel; the Little Isabel, which is
round; and Hermosa, which is the smallest.

That last is no more than a foot high, and about seven
paces across, a mere flat top of a grey rock which smokes
like a hot cinder after a shower, and where no man
would care to venture a naked sole before sunset. On
the Little Isabel an old ragged palm, with a thick bulging
trunk rough with spines, a very witch amongst palm
trees, rustles a dismal bunch of dead leaves above the
coarse sand. The Great Isabel has a spring of fresh
water issuing from the overgrown side of a ravine.
Resembling an emerald green wedge of land a mile long,
and laid flat upon the sea, it bears two forest trees standing
close together, with a wide spread of shade at the
foot of their smooth trunks. A ravine extending the
whole length of the island is full of bushes; and presenting
a deep tangled cleft on the high side spreads itself
out on the other into a shallow depression abutting
on a small strip of sandy shore.

From that low end of the Great Isabel the eye plunges
through an opening two miles away, as abrupt as if
chopped with an axe out of the regular sweep of the
coast, right into the harbour of Sulaco. It is an oblong,
lake-like piece of water. On one side the short wooded

spurs and valleys of the Cordillera come down at right
angles to the very strand; on the other the open view
of the great Sulaco plain passes into the opal mystery
of great distances overhung by dry haze. The town of
Sulaco itself — tops of walls, a great cupola, gleams of
white miradors in a vast grove of orange trees — lies
between the mountains and the plain, at some little
distance from its harbour and out of the direct line of
sight from the sea.