But sea, and the gale roaring, and blown spume.
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Las Palomas, where this story begins, is far away to windward on the sea-coast of the Tierra Firme. It has grown to be an important city since the northern railway was completed. It has been a frequented port since the days of the Conquistadores, because it is a safe harbour in all winds save the north, with good holding ground and an abundance of pure water for the filling. In the years 1879-80 it had an evil name, for it was then the nearest seaport to the newly discovered goldfields at Entre las Montanas in the province of Palo Seco, three hundred miles inland. Many diggers returning with gold from the fields were knocked on the head at Las Palomas.
Las Palomas means the Doves. It got its name from the blue rock-pigeons which used to haunt the cliffs just south of the old (or Spanish) town. The cliffs are now covered with buildings and the pigeons are gone. The only doves thereabouts now are the Little Doves of Santa Clara in a Convent school so named.
Las Palomas was formerly mainly a coffee and sugar port, but of late years it has become a great place for the exportation of copper-ore from the mines at Tloatlucan, only seven miles inland.
Nearly thirty years ago, when this story begins, there was open savannah to the north and north-west of Las Palomas city. In those days you could walk (in that direction) in less than an hour from the heart of the city into primeval forest. If you walked due north along the beach, from Jib and Foresail Quay on the water-front, you could reach a part of the forest in two miles. This was a clump of pines which came right down to the sea on a tongue of red earth.
If, in those days, you walked through those pines, still northward over the tongue, you came to a little beach, edged with a low bank of shrubbery. There, between the forest and the sea, was the mansion known as Los Xicales, where old General Martinez, the last descendant of one who came there with Cortés, lived to his end in faith, poverty and style.
Los Xicales.—Nobody knew at a first hearing what the xicales were. They were not jicales nor jicaras, as many thought, but trumpet-shaped flowers, with blue and white stripes, which General Martinez had brought there from the Indian territory. They were neither convolvuluses, petunias, nor hermositas, though like all three. They were just “xicales,” which is as near as the Spaniards could come to the Indian name for them, which means, simply, “flowers.” The house might have been called “the flowers” without loss of time.
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On the evening of the 18th March, 1887, just ten years before my story begins, Sard Harker, then on his first voyage to sea, lay in the barque Venturer, in Las Palomas harbour, expecting to sail at daybreak for Santa Barbara, “to complete with sugar for home.”