Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard
viejo! Are you there?" ... In the impenetrable darkness his head swam with the illusion that the obscurity of the kitchen was as vast as the Placid Gulf, and that the floor dipped forward like a sinking lighter. "Olà! viejo!" he repeated falteringly, swaying where he stood. His hand, extended to steady himself, fell upon the table. Moving a step forward, he shifted it, and felt a box of matches under his fingers. He fancied he had heard a quiet sigh. He listened for a moment, holding his breath; then, with trembling hands, tried to strike a light.
The tiny piece of wood flamed up quite blindingly at the end of his fingers, raised above his blinking eyes. A concentrated glare fell upon the leonine white head of old Giorgio against the black fireplace showed him leaning forward in a chair in staring immobility, surrounded, overhung, by great masses of shadow, his legs crossed, his cheek in his hand, an empty pipe in the corner of his mouth. It seemed hours before he attempted to turn his face; at the very moment the match went out, and he disappeared, overwhelmed by the shadows, as if the walls and roof of the desolate house had collapsed upon his white head in ghostly silence.
Nostromo heard him stir and utter dispassionately the words:
"It may have been a vision."
"No," he said, softly. "It is no vision, old man."
A strong chest voice asked very loud in the dark:
"Is that you I hear, Giovann' Battista?"
"Si, viejo. Steady. Not so loud."
After his release by Sotillo, Giorgio Viola, attended
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