The Three Sentinels Read Online Free PDF Page A

school or in his first job. The haze of sun and friendliness, of romance
and ambition which had once transfigured for him that prehistorically arid coast had vanished; but the plain facts stood firm and were unexpectedly familiar.
    ‘It hasn’t much changed,’ he said.
    The Master of the Company’s launch, standing formally at the wheel since he was about to enter the Company’s port, looked down from the grating almost with tenderness. He claimed to
have known Mr. Darlow twenty-five years before. It was likely. Mat had no idea which of the band of black, brown or whitish children this sympathetic seaman had been, but it was easy to pretend a
solid image within the cloud of so many common memories.
    ‘It is we who have changed,’ the skipper replied.
    That elegiac note sounding all the way from Spain. How they loved, these Latin-Americans, a resounding commonplace! And always it made speaker and hearer conscious of their bond of humanity.
    No, Cabo Desierto had not changed—lost its untidy air of pioneering, of course, and lost its youth in the process like the rest of them. The forest of derricks bailing and pumping away on
the second ridge of the hills so that one could hear the thudding of beams and engines two miles off shore was now silent and looked vaguely derelict, outmoded as a cluster of windmills with all
its timber food for the termites. Between the sea and the escarpment of the first ridge, where in early days had been waterless desert, twelve hundred acres of cultivated land extended northwards.
The green ribbon tying up such overpowering, colourless immensity emphasised more than ever the islanded quality of the place.
    He was glad that he was coming in by sea. The Company’s managerial plane had been at the airport on his arrival in the Capital. At the end of a day of champagne, offices and futility the
Ministry had advised him not to take it. Accidents, they whispered, could so easily be arranged. He didn’t believe it, and would have taken the plane as a first profession of faith if the
unsuspecting pilot had not vanished into the mountains with a girl. Good luck to him! The right way to enter Cabo Desierto was the public way—swept in by the unperturbed Pacific, not
descending from heaven to a sacred airfield like a London Wall Elijah.
    The launch entered the gateway of brown stone and creaming backwash. Two breakwaters there were now. A tanker could suck up her cargo in any weather. What an amazing place it was, with no
economic need of road or railway! A prison, yes, but their isolation, their excited hunting and spearing of the hills used to produce such comradeship between oil engineers and their gunbearers
that when the gas and black blood gushed from a lucky stab of the earth they had been as close in triumph as a band of pygmies inside an elephant.
    To what had they been loyal in all that orgy? To the Company? To the exploration itself? Most probably to the easily visible achievement. Whatever it was, the solidarity still held, though now
it was not directed towards anything; it was directed against. Against the Company.
    ‘Remember you are back at home, Don Mateo!’ said the skipper.
    That word of hospitable encouragement was just what he needed, and the Spanish form of his name gave him an unaccountable lift of morale. Mat Darlow was a failure and employed on a job that no
one else would look at; but Don Mateo was a free man whose power to take action was scarcely limited by London and not at all by Cabo Desierto.
    The inshore end of the breakwater was crowded with idle workers, some unashamedly curious, some pretending to be fishing. Mat met their eyes impassively and instantly asked himself what the hell
Don Mateo thought he was about. He raised his somewhat theatrical Panama hat in a genial salute and wished them a very good afternoon.
    At the landing stage the faces had a standardised smile on them, welcoming but decently conscious of emergency—a string of masks