Page 553 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

on high a stream of dry peas upon a drum. After listening
for a while, he said, half aloud—
‘He will never come back to explain.’
And he lowered his head again.
‘Impossible!’ he muttered, gloomily.
The sounds of firing died out. The loom of a great con-
flagration in Sulaco flashed up red above the coast, played
on the clouds at the head of the gulf, seemed to touch with a
ruddy and sinister reflection the forms of the Three Isabels.
He never saw it, though he raised his head.
‘But, then, I cannot know,’ he pronounced, distinctly,
and remained silent and staring for hours.
He could not know. Nobody was to know. As might have
been supposed, the end of Don Martin Decoud never be-
came a subject of speculation for any one except Nostromo.
Had the truth of the facts been known, there would always
have remained the question. Why? Whereas the version of
his death at the sinking of the lighter had no uncertainty of
motive. The young apostle of Separation had died striving
for his idea by an ever-lamented accident. But the truth was
that he died from solitude, the enemy known but to few on
this earth, and whom only the simplest of us are fit to with-
stand. The brilliant Costaguanero of the boulevards had
died from solitude and want of faith in himself and others.
For some good and valid reasons beyond mere human
comprehension, the sea-birds of the gulf shun the Isabels.
The rocky head of Azuera is their haunt, whose stony lev-
els and chasms resound with their wild and tumultuous
clamour as if they were for ever quarrelling over the leg-

Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard