and the dusk and the 'darkness descending upon the line of the horizon'. Similarly, Martin Decoud's exile on the Isabels to guard the silver of the San Tome mine is perceieved as endless by the "brilliant son decoud", "spoilt darling of the family" and the "journalist of Sulaco" but is measured against actual time of days and of night and day. He spent the night open -eyed and when the day broke he ate something with the same indifference...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 upto these people in Sulaco...sleeplessness had robbed his will of all energy, for he had not slept seven hours in seven days...On the tenth day, after a night spent without even dozing off once, 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. Only towards the evening, in the comparitive relief of coolness , he began to wish that this cord would snap...the sun was two hours above the horizon when he got up, gaunt, dirty, white-faced and looked at it with his red-rimmed eyes...The dawn from behind the mountains put a gleam into his unwinking eyes...drew the revolver, cocked it, brought it forward pointing at his breast, pulled the trigger...'It is done', he stammered out, in a sudden flow of blood...(p.412,413&414) So Decoud's open-eyed vigil is measured in terms of 'fifth day', 'tenth day', in terms of the sun which was 'two hours above the horizon' and 'the evening' which arrived with 'its relief of coolness'. The psychological time is here seen as merging with psychological time. In his handling of time or more particularly time-flux Conrad, achieved another first for a novelist. Language, consisting as it does of bounded discrete units cannot satisfactorily represent the unbounded and continuous .
Part of the Dream Weave Walk 1999-2010