Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard
A light. He saw it shining upon disgrace, poverty, contempt. Somebody was sure to . . . Perhaps somebody had already . . .
incomparable Nostromo, the capataz, the respected and feared Captain Fidanza, the unquestioned oracle of secret societies, a republican like old Giorgio, and a revolutionist at heart (but in another manner), was on the point of jumping overboard from the deck of his own schooner. That man, subjective almost to insanity, looked suicide deliberately in the face. But he never lost his head. He was checked by the thought that this was no escape. He imagined himself dead, and the disgrace, the shame going on. Or. rather, properly speaking, he could not imagine himself dead. He was possessed too strongly by the sense of his own existence, a thing of infinite duration in its changes, to grasp the notion of finality. The earth goes on forever.
And he was courageous. It was a corrupt courage, but it was as good for his purposes as the other kind He sailed close to the cliff of the Great Isabel, throwing a penetrating glance from the deck at the mouth of the ravine, tangled in an undisturbed growth of bushes. He sailed close enough to exchange hails with the workmen, shading their eyes on the edge of the sheer drop of the cliff, "overhung by the jib-head of a powerful crane. He perceived that none of them had any occasion even to approach the ravine where the silver lay hidden, let alone to enter it. In the harbor he learned that no one slept on the island. The laboring gangs returned to port every evening, singing chorus songs, in the empty lighters towed by a harbor tug. For the moment he had nothing to fear.
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