Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard
the same but utterly incomprehensible, about Nostromo, Antonia, Barrios, and proclamations mingled into an ironical and senseless buzzing. In the daytime he could look at the silence like a still cord stretched to breaking-point, with his life, his vain life, suspended to it like a weight.
"I wonder whether I would hear it snap before fell," he asked himself.
The sun was two hours above the horizon when he got up, gaunt, dirty, white-faced, and looked at it I with his red-rimmed eyes. His limbs obeyed him yet slowly, as if full of lead, but without tremor; and the effect of that physical condition gave to his movements an unhesitating, deliberate dignity. He acted as if accomplishing some sort of rite. He descended into the gully; for the fascination of all that silver, with its potential power, survived alone outside of himself. He picked up the belt with the revolver, that was lying there, and buckled it round his waist. The cord of silence could never snap on the island. It must let him fall and sink into the sea, he thought. And sink! He was looking at the loose earth covering the treasure. In the sea! His aspect was that of a somnambulist. He lowered himself down on his knees slowly and went on grubbing with his fingers with industrious patience till he uncovered one of the boxes. Without a pause, as if doing some work done many times before, he slit it open and took four ingots which he put in his pockets. He covered up the exposed box again and step by step came out of the gully. The bushes closed after him with a swish.
It was on the third day of his solitude that he had
558
