Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

PART THIRD: THE LIGHTHOUSE 9. CHAPTER NINE (continued)

Sotillo, followed by the soldiers, had left the room. The sentry
on the landing presented arms. Hirsch went on screaming all alone
behind the half-closed jalousies while the sunshine, reflected
from the water of the harbour, made an ever-running ripple of
light high up on the wall. He screamed with uplifted eyebrows and
a wide-open mouth--incredibly wide, black, enormous, full of
teeth--comical.

In the still burning air of the windless afternoon he made the
waves of his agony travel as far as the O. S. N. Company's
offices. Captain Mitchell on the balcony, trying to make out what
went on generally, had heard him faintly but distinctly, and the
feeble and appalling sound lingered in his ears after he had
retreated indoors with blanched cheeks. He had been driven off
the balcony several times during that afternoon.

Sotillo, irritable, moody, walked restlessly about, held
consultations with his officers, gave contradictory orders in
this shrill clamour pervading the whole empty edifice. Sometimes
there would be long and awful silences. Several times he had
entered the torture-chamber where his sword, horsewhip, revolver,
and field-glass were lying on the table, to ask with forced
calmness, "Will you speak the truth now? No? I can wait." But he
could not afford to wait much longer. That was just it. Every
time he went in and came out with a slam of the door, the sentry
on the landing presented arms, and got in return a black,
venomous, unsteady glance, which, in reality, saw nothing at all,
being merely the reflection of the soul within--a soul of gloomy
hatred, irresolution, avarice, and fury.

The sun had set when he went in once more. A soldier carried in
two lighted candles and slunk out, shutting the door without
noise.

"Speak, thou Jewish child of the devil! The silver! The silver,
I say! Where is it? Where have you foreign rogues hidden it?
Confess or--"

A slight quiver passed up the taut rope from the racked limbs,
but the body of Senor Hirsch, enterprising business man from
Esmeralda, hung under the heavy beam perpendicular and silent,
facing the colonel awfully. The inflow of the night air, cooled
by the snows of the Sierra, spread gradually a delicious
freshness through the close heat of the room.