VIII
AFTER landing from his swim, Nostromo had scrambled up, all dripping, into the main quadrangle of the old fort, and there, among ruined bits of walls and rotting remnants of roofs and sheds, he had slept the day through. He had slept in the shadow of the mountains, in the white blaze of noon, in the stillness and solitude of that overgrown piece of land between the nearly closed oval of the harbor and the spacious semicircle of the gulf. He lay as if dead. A rey-zamuro, appearing like a tiny black speck in the blue, stooped, circling prudently with a stealthiness of flight startling in a bird of that great size. The shadow of his pearly white body, of his black-tipped wings, fell on the grass no more silently than he alighted himself on a hillock of rubbish within three yards of that man lying as still as a corpse. He stretched his bare neck, craned his bald head, loathsome in the brilliance of varied coloring, with an air of voracious anxiety towards the promising stillness of that prostrate body. Then sinking his head deeply into his soft plumage he settled himself to wait. The first thing upon which Nostromo's eyes fell on waking was this patient watcher for the signs of death and corruption. When the man got up the vulture hopped away in great, sidelong, fluttering jumps. He lingered
459
