ught 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 descended upon him palpably. He resolved not to
give himself up to these people in Sulaco, who had beset him, unreal and
terrible, like jibbering and obscene spectres. He saw himself struggling
feebly in their midst, and Antonia, gigantic and lovely like an
allegorical statue, looking on with scornful eyes at his weakness.

Not a living being, not a speck of distant sail, appeared within
the range of his vision; and, as if to escape from this solitude,
he absorbed himself in his melancholy. The vague consciousness of a
misdirected life given up to impulses whose memory left a bitter taste
in his mouth was the first moral sentiment of his manhood. But at the
same time he felt no remorse. What should he regret? He had recognized
no other virtue than intelligence, and had erected passions into duties.
Both his intelligence and his passion were swallowed up easily in this
great unbroken solitude of waiting without faith. Sleeplessness had
robbed his will of all energy, for he had not slept seven hours in the
seven days. His sadness was the sadness of a sceptical mind. He beheld
the universe as a succession of incomprehensible images. Nostromo was
dead. Everything had failed ignominiously. He no longer dared to think
of Antonia. She had not survived. But if she survived he could not face
her. And all exertion seemed senseless.

On the tenth day, after a night spent without even dozing off once (it
had occurred to him that Antonia could not possibly have ever loved
a being so impalpable as himself), the solitude appeared like a great
void, and the silence of the gulf like a tense, thin cord to which he
hung suspended by both hands, without fear, without surprise, without
any sort of emotion whatever. Only towards the evening, in the
comparative relief of coolness, he began to wish that this cord would
snap. He imagined it snapping with a report as of a pistol--a sharp,
full crack. And that would be the end of him. He contemplated that
eventuality with pleasure, because he dreaded the sleepless nights in
which the silen