ays 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.

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 ca