slaves. And the leperos, flinging about the corners of their dirty white mantas,
yelled their approbation. General Montero, Gamacho howled with conviction, was
the only man equal to the patriotic task. They assented to that, too.
    The morning was wearing on; there were already signs of disruption, currents
and eddies in the crowd. Some were seeking the shade of the walls and under the
trees of the Alameda. Horsemen spurred through, shouting; groups of sombreros
set level on heads against the vertical sun were drifting away into the streets,
where the open doors of pulperias revealed an enticing gloom resounding with the
gentle tinkling of guitars. The National Guards were thinking of siesta, and the
eloquence of Gamacho, their chief, was exhausted. Later on, when, in the cooler
hours of the afternoon, they tried to assemble again for further consideration
of public affairs, detachments of Montero's cavalry camped on the Alameda
charged them without parley, at speed, with long lances levelled at their flying
backs as far as the ends of the streets. The National Guards of Sulaco were
surprised by this proceeding. But they were not indignant. No Costaguanero had
ever learned to question the eccentricities of a military force. They were part
of the natural order of things. This must be, they concluded, some kind of
administrative measure, no doubt. But the motive of it escaped their unaided
intelligence, and their chief and orator, Gamacho, Commandante of the National
Guard, was lying drunk and asleep in the bosom of his family. His bare feet were
upturned in the shadows repulsively, in the manner of a corpse. His eloquent
mouth had dropped open. His youngest daughter, scratching her head with one
hand, with the other waved a green bough over his scorched and peeling face.
 

                                  Chapter Six

The declining sun had shifted the shadows from west to east amongst the houses
of the town. It had shifted them upon the whole extent of the immense Campo,
with the white walls of its haciendas on the knolls dominating the green
distances; with its grass-thatched ranchos crouching in the folds of ground by
the banks of streams; with the dark islands of clustered trees on a clear sea of
grass, and the precipitous range of the Cordillera, immense and motionless,
emerging from the billows of the lower forests like the barren coast of a land
of giants. The sunset rays striking the snow-slope of Higuerota from afar gave
it an air of rosy youth, while the serrated mass of distant peaks remained
black, as if calcined in the fiery radiance. The undulating surface of the
forests seemed