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.
    He spent the night open-eyed, and when the day broke he ate something with
the same indifference. The brilliant »Son Decoud,« the spoiled darling of the
family, the lover of Antonia and journalist of Sulaco, was not fit to grapple
with himself single-handed. Solitude from mere outward condition of existence
becomes very swiftly a state of soul in which the affectations of irony and
scepticism have no place. It takes possession of the mind, and drives forth the
thought into the exile of utter unbelief. After three days of waiting for the
sight of some human face, Decoud caught himself entertaining a doubt of his own
individuality. It had merged into the world of cloud and water, of natural
forces and forms of nature. In our activity alone do we find the sustaining
illusion of an independent existence as against the whole scheme of things of
which we form a helpless part. Decoud lost all belief in the reality of his
action past and to come. On the fifth day an immense melancholy