Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard
the booths, checking the mare almost to a stand-still now and then for children, for the groups of people from the distant Campo, who stared after him with admiration. The company's lightermen he met saluted him from afar; and the greatly envied capataz de cargadores advanced, among murmurs of recognition and obsequious greetings, towards the huge circus-like erection. The throng thickened; the guitars tinkled louder; other horseman sat motionless, smoking calmly above the heads of the crowd; it eddied and pushed before the doors of the high-roofed building, whence issued a shuffle and thumping of feet in time to the dance-music vibrating and shrieking with a racking rhythm, overhung by the tremendous, sustained, hollow roar of the gombo. The barbarous and imposing noise of the big drum, that can madden a crowd, and that even Europeans cannot hear without a strange emotion, seemed to draw Nostromo on to its source, while a man, wrapped up in a faded, torn poncho, walked by his stirrup, and, buffeted right and left, begged "his worship" insistently for employment on the wharf. He whined, offering the Señor Capataz half his daily pay for the privilege of being admitted to the swaggering fraternity of cargadores; the other half would be enough for him, he protested. But Captain Mitchell's right-hand man "invaluable for our work a perfectly incorruptible fellow" after looking down critically at the ragged mozo, shook his head without a word in the uproar going on around.
The man fell back; and a little farther on Nostromo had to pull up. From the doors of the dance-hall men and women emerged tottering, streaming with sweat,
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