sides of dwellings so flimsy that the sound of snores and sleepy mutters
within could be heard in the pauses of the thundering clatter of his
blows. He called out men's names menacingly from the saddle, once,
twice. The drowsy answers--grumpy, conciliating, savage, jocular, or
deprecating--came out into the silent darkness in which the horseman sat
still, and presently a dark figure would flit out coughing in the still
air. Sometimes a low-toned woman cried through the window-hole softly,
"He's coming directly, senor," and the horseman waited silent on a
motionless horse. But if perchance he had to dismount, then, after a
while, from the door of that hovel or of that pulperia, with a ferocious
scuffle and stifled imprecations, a cargador would fly out head first
and hands abroad, to sprawl under the forelegs of the silver-grey mare,
who only pricked forward her sharp little ears. She was used to that
work; and the man, picking himself up, would walk away hastily from
Nostromo's revolver, reeling a little along the street and snarling low
curses. At sunrise Captain Mitchell, coming out anxiously in his night
attire on to the wooden balcony running the whole length of the O.S.N.
Company's lonely building by the shore, would see the lighters already
under way, figures moving busily about the cargo cranes, perhaps hear
the invaluable Nostromo, now dismounted and in the checked shirt and red
sash of a Mediterranean sailor, bawling orders from the end of the jetty
in a stentorian voice. A fellow in a thousand!

The material apparatus of perfected civilization which obliterates the
individuality of old towns under the stereotyped conveniences of modern
life had not intruded as yet; but over the worn-out antiquity of Sulaco,
so characteristic with its stuccoed houses and barred windows, with
the great yellowy-white walls of abandoned convents behind the rows of
sombre green cypresses, that fact--very modern in its spirit--the San
Tome mine had already thrown its subtle influence. It had altered, too,