Nostromo - A Tale of the Seaboard.pdf - Planet eBook

keen blade piercing his breast.The rest of the night he made no sound. The darknessturned to grey, and on the colourless, clear, glassy dawn thejagged sierra stood out flat and opaque, as if cut out of paper.The enthusiastic and severe soul of Giorgio Viola, sailor,champion of oppressed humanity, enemy of kings, and, bythe grace of Mrs. Gould, hotel-keeper of the Sulaco harbour,had descended into the open abyss of desolation amongstthe shattered vestiges of his past. He remembered his wooingbetween two campaigns, a single short week in the seasonof gathering olives. Nothing approached the grave passionof that time but the deep, passionate sense of his bereavement.He discovered all the extent of his dependence uponthe silenced voice of that woman. It was her voice that hemissed. Abstracted, busy, lost in inward contemplation, heseldom looked at his wife in those later years. The thoughtof his girls was a matter of concern, not of consolation. Itwas her voice that he would miss. And he rememberedthe other child—the little boy who died at sea. Ah! a manwould have been something to lean upon. And, alas! evenGian’ Battista—he of whom, and of Linda, his wife had spokento him so anxiously before she dropped off into her lastsleep on earth, he on whom she had called aloud to save thechildren, just before she died—even he was dead!And the old man, bent forward, his head in his hand, satthrough the day in immobility and solitude. He never heardthe brazen roar of the bells in town. When it ceased theearthenware filter in the corner of the kitchen kept on its