Quotation from: Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard

Written by: Joseph Conrad


But Don Jose, disregarding the general indictment as though he had
not heard a word of it, took up the defence of Barrios. The man was
competent enough for his special task in the plan of campaign. It
consisted in an offensive movement, with Cayta as base, upon the flank
of the Revolutionist forces advancing from the south against Sta. Marta,
which was covered by another army with the President-Dictator in its
midst. Don Jose became quite animated with a great flow of speech,
bending forward anxiously under the steady eyes of his daughter. Decoud,
as if silenced by so much ardour, did not make a sound. The bells of the
city were striking the hour of Oracion when the carriage rolled under
the old gateway facing the harbour like a shapeless monument of leaves
and stones. The rumble of wheels under the sonorous arch was traversed
by a strange, piercing shriek, and Decoud, from his back seat, had a
view of the people behind the carriage trudging along the road outside,
all turning their heads, in sombreros and rebozos, to look at a
locomotive which rolled quickly out of sight behind Giorgio Viola's
house, under a white trail of steam that seemed to vanish in the
breathless, hysterically prolonged scream of warlike triumph. And it
was all like a fleeting vision, the shrieking ghost of a railway engine
fleeing across the frame of the archway, behind the startled movement
of the people streaming back from a military spectacle with silent
footsteps on the dust of the road. It was a material train returning
from the Campo to the palisaded yards. The empty cars rolled lightly
on the single track; there was no rumble of wheels, no tremor of the
ground. The engine-driver, running past the Casa Viola with the salute
of an uplifted arm, checked his speed smartly before entering the yard;
and when the ear-splitting screech of the steam-whistle for the brakes
had stopped, a series of hard, battering shocks, mingled with the
clanking of chain-couplings, made a tumult of blows and shaken fetters
under the vault of the gate.

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