Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard
to cover his face with his hands. He was raised up.
His heart was beating violently with the fear of this
liberty. When he tried to walk the extraordinary
lightness of his feet made him giddy, and he fell down. Two sticks were thrust into his hands, and he was
pushed out of the passage. It was dusk; candles glimmered already in the windows of the officers' quarters
round the court-yard, but the twilight sky dazed him
by its enormous and overwhelming brilliance. A thin
poncho hung over his naked, bony shoulders; the rags
of his trousers came down no lower than his knees; an
eighteen months' growth of hair fell in dirty-gray locks
on each side of his sharp cheek-bones. As he dragged
himself past the guard-room door one of the soldiers,
lolling outside, moved-by some obscure impulse, leaped
forward with a strange laugh and rammed a broken
old straw hat on his head. And Dr. Monygham, after
having tottered, continued on his way. He advanced
one stick, then one maimed foot, then the other stick;
the other foot followed only a very short distance along
the ground, toilfully, as though it were almost too
heavy to be moved at all; and yet his legs, under the
hanging angles of the poncho, appeared no thicker
than the two sticks in his hands. A ceaseless trembling
agitated his bent body, all his wasted limbs, his bony
head, the conical, ragged crown of the sombrero whose
ample, flat rim rested on his shoulders.
In such conditions of manner and attire did Dr. Monygham go forth to take possession of his liberty. And these conditions seemed to bind him indissolubly to the land of Costaguana like an awful procedure of naturalization, involving him deep in the
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