Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

PART THIRD: THE LIGHTHOUSE 10. CHAPTER TEN (continued)

"But, then, I cannot know," he pronounced, distinctly, and
remained silent and staring for hours.

He could not know. Nobody was to know. As might have been
supposed, the end of Don Martin Decoud never became a subject of
speculation for any one except Nostromo. Had the truth of the
facts been known, there would always have remained the question.
Why? Whereas the version of his death at the sinking of the
lighter had no uncertainty of motive. The young apostle of
Separation had died striving for his idea by an ever-lamented
accident. But the truth was that he died from solitude, the
enemy known but to few on this earth, and whom only the simplest
of us are fit to withstand. The brilliant Costaguanero of the
boulevards had died from solitude and want of faith in himself
and others.

For some good and valid reasons beyond mere human comprehension,
the sea-birds of the gulf shun the Isabels. The rocky head of
Azuera is their haunt, whose stony levels and chasms resound with
their wild and tumultuous clamour as if they were for ever
quarrelling over the legendary treasure.

At the end of his first day on the Great Isabel, Decoud, turning
in his lair of coarse grass, under the shade of a tree, said to
himself--

"I have not seen as much as one single bird all day."

And he had not heard a sound, either, all day but that one now of
his own muttering voice. It had been a day of absolute
silence--the first he had known in his life. And he had not slept
a wink. Not for all these wakeful nights and the days of
fighting, planning, talking; not for all that last night of
danger and hard physical toil upon the gulf, had he been able to
close his eyes for a moment. And yet from sunrise to sunset he
had been lying prone on the ground, either on his back or on his
face.

He stretched himself, and with slow steps descended into the
gully to spend the night by the side of the silver. If Nostromo
returned--as he might have done at any moment--it was there that
he would look first; and night would, of course, be the proper
time for an attempt to communicate. He remembered with profound
indifference that he had not eaten anything yet since he had been
left alone on the island.