; and they shall not have it, I
tell you, since it has been tied for safety round Nostromo's neck."

"I see it," murmured Decoud. He saw, indeed, that his companion had his
own peculiar view of this enterprise.

Nostromo interrupted his reflections upon the way men's qualities are
made use of, without any fundamental knowledge of their nature, by the
proposal they should slip the long oars out and sweep the lighter in
the direction of the Isabels. It wouldn't do for daylight to reveal
the treasure floating within a mile or so of the harbour entrance. The
denser the darkness generally, the smarter were the puffs of wind on
which he had reckoned to make his way; but tonight the gulf, under its
poncho of clouds, remained breathless, as if dead rather than asleep.

Don Martin's soft hands suffered cruelly, tugging at the thick handle of
the enormous oar. He stuck to it manfully, setting his teeth. He, too,
was in the toils of an imaginative existence, and that strange work of
pulling a lighter seemed to belong naturally to the inception of a new
state, acquired an ideal meaning from his love for Antonia. For all
their efforts, the heavily laden lighter hardly moved. Nostromo could
be heard swearing to himself between the regular splashes of the sweeps.
"We are making a crooked path," he muttered to himself. "I wish I could
see the islands."

In his unskilfulness Don Martin over-exerted himself. Now and then a
sort of muscular faintness would run from the tips of his aching fingers
through every fibre of his body, and pass off in a flush of heat. He had
fought, talked, suffered mentally and physically, exerting his mind and
body for the last forty-eight hours without intermission. He had had no
rest, very little food, no pause in the stress of his thoughts and his
feelings. Even his love for Antonia, whence he drew his strength and
his inspiration, had reached the point of tragic tension during their
hurried interview by Don Jose's bedside. And now, suddenly, he was
thrown out of all this into a dark gulf, whose very gloom, silence, and
breathless peace added a torment to the necessity for physical exertion.
He imagined the lighter sinking to the bottom with an extraordinary
shudder of delight. "I am on the verge of delirium," he thought. He
mastered the trembling of all his limbs, of his breast, the inward
trembling of all his body exhausted of its nervous force.

"Shall we rest, Capataz?" he proposed in a careless tone