Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard

In the time of Spanish rule, and for many years afterwards, the town of Sulaco-theluxuriant beauty of the orange gardens bears witness to its antiquity-had never beencommercially anything more important than a coasting port with a fairly large local tradein ox-hides and indigo. The clumsy deep-sea galleons of the conquerors that, needing abrisk gale to move at all, would lie becalmed, where your modern ship built on clipper linesforges ahead by the mere flapping of her sails, had been barred out of Sulaco by theprevailing calms of its vast gulf. Some harbours of the earth are made difficult of access bythe treachery of sunken rocks and the tempests of their shores. Sulaco had found aninviolable sanctuary from the temptations of a trading world in the solemn hush of thedeep Golfo Placido as if within an enormous semi-circular and unroofed temple open to theocean, 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 shoulderof a steep hill at the back can be made out faintly like a shadow on the sky