Page 554 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

endary treasure.
At the end of his first day on the Great Isabel, Decoud,
turning in his lair of coarse grass, under the shade of a tree,
said to himself—
‘I have not seen as much as one single bird all day.’
And he had not heard a sound, either, all day but that one
now of his own muttering voice. It had been a day of abso-
lute silence—the first he had known in his life. And he had
not slept a wink. Not for all these wakeful nights and the
days of fighting, planning, talking; not for all that last night
of danger and hard physical toil upon the gulf, had he been
able to close his eyes for a moment. And yet from sunrise to
sunset he had been lying prone on the ground, either on his
back or on his face.
He stretched himself, and with slow steps descended
into the gully to spend the night by the side of the sil-
ver. If Nostromo returned—as he might have done at any
moment—it was there that he would look first; and night
would, of course, be the proper time for an attempt to com-
municate. He remembered with profound indifference that
he had not eaten anything yet since he had been left alone
on the island.
He spent the night open-eyed, and when the day broke
he ate something with the same indifference. The brilliant
‘Son Decoud,’ the spoiled darling of the family, the lover
of Antonia and journalist of Sulaco, was not fit to grapple
with himself single-handed. Solitude from mere outward
condition of existence becomes very swiftly a state of soul
in which the affectations of irony and scepticism have no