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

universe as a succession of incomprehensible images. Nostromowas dead. Everything had failed ignominiously. Heno longer dared to think of Antonia. She had not survived.But if she survived he could not face her. And all exertionseemed senseless.On the tenth day, after a night spent without even dozingoff once (it had occurred to him that Antonia could notpossibly have ever loved a being so impalpable as himself),the solitude appeared like a great void, and the silence ofthe gulf like a tense, thin cord to which he hung suspendedby both hands, without fear, without surprise, without anysort of emotion whatever. Only towards the evening, in thecomparative relief of coolness, he began to wish that thiscord would snap. He imagined it snapping with a report asof a pistol—a sharp, full crack. And that would be the endof him. He contemplated that eventuality with pleasure, becausehe dreaded the sleepless nights in which the silence,remaining unbroken in the shape of a cord to which he hungwith both hands, vibrated with senseless phrases, alwaysthe same but utterly incomprehensible, about Nostromo,Antonia, Barrios, and proclamations mingled into an ironicaland senseless buzzing. In the daytime he could look atthe silence like a still cord stretched to breakingpoint, withhis life, his vain life, suspended to it like a weight.‘I wonder whether I would hear it snap before I fell,’ heasked himself.The sun was two hours above the horizon when he gotup, gaunt, dirty, white-faced, and looked at it with his redrimmedeyes. His limbs obeyed him slowly, as if full of lead,