In the time of Spanish rule, and for many years afterwards, the town of
Sulaco--the luxuriant beauty of the orange gardens bears witness to its
antiquity--had never been commercially anything more important than a
coasting port with a fairly large local trade in ox-hides and indigo.
The clumsy deep-sea galleons of the conquerors that, needing a brisk
gale to move at all, would lie becalmed, where your modern ship built on
clipper lines forges ahead by the mere flapping of her sails, had been
barred out of Sulaco by the prevailing calms of its vast gulf. Some
harbours of the earth are made difficult of access by the treachery
of sunken rocks and the tempests of their shores. Sulaco had found an
inviolable sanctuary from the temptations of a trading world in
the solemn hush of the deep Golfo Placido as if within an enormous
semi-circular and unroofed temple open to the ocean, 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 shoulder of a steep hill
at the back can be made out faintly like a shadow on the sky.
On the other side, what seems to be an isolated patch of blue mist
floats lightly on the glare of the horizon. This is the peninsula
of Azuera, a wild chaos of sharp rocks and stony levels cut about by
vertical ravines. It lies far out to sea like a rough head of stone
stretched from a green-clad coast at the end of a slender neck of
sand covered with thickets of thorny scrub. Utterly waterless, for the
rainfall runs off at once on all sides into the sea, it has not soil
enough--it is said--to grow a single blade of grass, as if it were
blighted by a curse. The poor, associating by an obscure instinct of
consolation the ideas of evil and wealth, will tell you that it is
deadly because of its forbidden treasures. The common folk of the
neighbourhood, peons of the estancias, vaqueros of the seaboard plains,
tame Indians coming miles to market with a bundle of sugar-cane or a
basket of maize worth about threepence, are well aware that heaps of
shining gold lie in the gloom of the deep precipices cleaving the stony
levels of Azuera. Tradition has it that many adventurers of olden time
had perished in the search. The story goes also that within men’s memory
two wandering sailors--Americanos, perhaps, but gringos of some sort for
certain--talked over a gambling, good-for-nothing mozo, and the three
stole a donkey to carry for them a bundle of dry sticks, a water-skin,
and provisions enough to last a few days. Thus accompanied, and with
revolvers at their belts, they had started to chop their way with
machetes through the thorny scrub on the neck of the peninsula.
On the second evening an upright spiral of smoke (it could only have
been from their camp-fire) was seen for the first time within memory of
man standing up faintly upon the sky above a razor-backed ridge on the
stony head. The crew of a coasting schooner, lying becalmed three miles
off the shore, stared at it with amazement till dark. A negro fisherman,
living in a lonely hut in a little bay near by, had seen the start and
was on the lookout for some sign. He called to his wife just as the
sun was about to set. They had watched the strange portent with envy,
incredulity, and awe.
The impious adventurers gave no other sign. The sailors, the Indian,
and the stolen burro were never seen again. As to the mozo, a Sulaco
man--his wife paid for some masses, and the poor four-footed beast,
being without sin, had been probably permitted to die; but the two
gringos, spectral and alive, are believed to be dwelling to this day
amongst the rocks, under the fatal spell of their success. Their souls
cannot tear themselves away from their bodies mounting guard over the
discovered treasure. They are now rich and hungry and thirsty--a strange
theory of tenacious gringo ghosts suffering in their starved and parched
flesh of defiant heretics, where a Christian would have renounced and
been released.
These, then, are the legendary inhabitants of Azuera guarding its
forbidden wealth; and the shadow on the sky on one side with the round
patch of blue haze blurring the bright skirt of the horizon on the
other, mark the two outermost points of the bend which bears the name of
Golfo Placido, because never a strong wind had been known to blow upon
its waters.
On crossing the imaginary line drawn from Punta Mala to Azuera the
ships from Europe bound to Sulaco lose at once the strong breezes of the
ocean. They become the prey of capricious airs that play with them for
thirty hours at a stretch sometimes. Before them the head of the calm
gulf is filled on most days of the year by a great body of motionless
and opaque clouds. On the rare clear mornings another shadow is cast
upon the sweep of the gulf. The dawn breaks high behind the towering
and serrated wall of the Cordillera, a clear-cut vision of dark peaks
rearing their steep slopes on a lofty pedestal of forest rising from the
very edge of the shore. Amongst them the white head of Higuerota rises
majestically upon the blue. Bare clusters of enormous rocks sprinkle
with tiny black dots the smooth dome of snow.
Then, as the midday sun withdraws from the gulf the shadow of the
mountains, the clouds begin to roll out of the lower valleys. They
swathe in sombre tatters the naked crags of precipices above the wooded
slopes, hide the peaks, smoke in stormy trails across the snows of
Higuerota. The Cordillera is gone from you as if it had dissolved itself
into great piles of grey and black vapours that travel out slowly to
seaward and vanish into thin air all along the front before the blazing
heat of the day. The wasting edge of the cloud-bank always strives for,
but seldom wins, the middle of the gulf. The sun--as the sailors say--is
eating it up. Unless perchance a sombre thunder-head breaks away from
the main body to career all over the gulf till it escapes into the
offing beyond Azuera, where it bursts suddenly into flame and crashes
like a sinster pirate-ship of the air, hove-to above the horizon,
engaging the sea.
At night the body of clouds advancing higher up the sky smothers the
whole quiet gulf below with an impenetrable darkness, in which the sound
of the falling showers can be heard beginning and ceasing abruptly--now
here, now there. Indeed, these cloudy nights are proverbial with the
seamen along the whole west coast of a great continent. Sky, land, and
sea disappear together out of the world when the Placido--as the saying
is--goes to sleep under its black poncho. The few stars left below the
seaward frown of the vault shine feebly as into the mouth of a black
cavern. In its vastness your ship floats unseen under your feet, her
sails flutter invisible above your head. The eye of God Himself--they
add with grim profanity--could not find out what work a man’s hand is
doing in there; and you would be free to call the devil to your aid with
impunity if even his malice were not defeated by such a blind darkness.
The shores on the gulf are steep-to all round; three uninhabited islets
basking in the sunshine just outside the cloud veil, and opposite the
entrance to the harbour of Sulaco, bear the name of “The Isabels.”
There is the Great Isabel; the Little Isabel, which is round; and
Hermosa, which is the smallest.
That last is no more than a foot high, and about seven paces across,
a mere flat top of a grey rock which smokes like a hot cinder after
a shower, and where no man would care to venture a naked sole before
sunset. On the Little Isabel an old ragged palm, with a thick bulging
trunk rough with spines, a very witch amongst palm trees, rustles a
dismal bunch of dead leaves above the coarse sand. The Great Isabel has
a spring of fresh water issuing from the overgrown side of a ravine.
Resembling an emerald green wedge of land a mile long, and laid flat
upon the sea, it bears two forest trees standing close together, with
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.