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.



CHAPTER TWO

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
seaboard, but except Cayta, an important place, all are either small
and inconvenient inlets in an iron-bound coast--like Esmeralda, for