Quotation from: Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard

Written by: Joseph Conrad


Charles Gould on going out passed his hand over his forehead as if to
disperse the mists of an oppressive dream, whose grotesque extravagance
leaves behind a subtle sense of bodily danger and intellectual decay. In
the passages and on the staircases of the old palace Montero's troopers
lounged about insolently, smoking and making way for no one; the
clanking of sabres and spurs resounded all over the building. Three
silent groups of civilians in severe black waited in the main gallery,
formal and helpless, a little huddled up, each keeping apart from the
others, as if in the exercise of a public duty they had been overcome
by a desire to shun the notice of every eye. These were the deputations
waiting for their audience. The one from the Provincial Assembly, more
restless and uneasy in its corporate expression, was overtopped by the
big face of Don Juste Lopez, soft and white, with prominent eyelids and
wreathed in impenetrable solemnity as if in a dense cloud. The President
of the Provincial Assembly, coming bravely to save the last shred of
parliamentary institutions (on the English model), averted his eyes
from the Administrador of the San Tome mine as a dignified rebuke of his
little faith in that only saving principle.

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