Page 471 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

without a woman in an open shed, with a perpetual fire of
dry sticks smouldering near an old canoe lying bottom up
on the beach. He could be easily avoided.
The barking of the dogs about that man’s ranche was
the first thing that checked his speed. He had forgotten
the dogs. He swerved sharply, and plunged into the palm-
grove, as into a wilderness of columns in an immense hall,
whose dense obscurity seemed to whisper and rustle faintly
high above his head. He traversed it, entered a ravine, and
climbed to the top of a steep ridge free of trees and bushes.
From there, open and vague in the starlight, he saw the
plain between the town and the harbour. In the woods
above some night-bird made a strange drumming noise.
Below beyond the palmaria on the beach, the Indian’s dogs
continued to bark uproariously. He wondered what had up-
set them so much, and, peering down from his elevation,
was surprised to detect unaccountable movements of the
ground below, as if several oblong pieces of the plain had
been in motion. Those dark, shifting patches, alternate-
ly catching and eluding the eye, altered their place always
away from the harbour, with a suggestion of consecutive or-
der and purpose. A light dawned upon him. It was a column
of infantry on a night march towards the higher broken
country at the foot of the hills. But he was too much in the
dark about everything for wonder and speculation.
The plain had resumed its shadowy immobility. He de-
scended the ridge and found himself in the open solitude,
between the harbour and the town. Its spaciousness, ex-
tended indefinitely by an effect of obscurity, rendered more

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