In this
listless attitude he was faintly conscious of a distant reverberation,
a mere phantom of sound--perhaps the explosion of a distant blast in
the hills--that left the silence more marked and oppressive. As he
turned again into the cabin a change seemed to have come over it. It
already looked old and decayed. The loneliness of years of desertion
seemed to have taken possession of it; the atmosphere of dry rot was in
the beams and rafters. To his excited fancy the few disordered blankets
and articles of clothing seemed dropping to pieces; in one of the bunks
there was a hideous resemblance in the longitudinal heap of clothing to
a withered and mummied corpse. So it might look in after-years when
some passing stranger--but he stopped. A dread of the place was
beginning to creep over him; a dread of the days to come, when the
monotonous sunshine should lay bare the loneliness of these walls; the
long, long days of endless blue and cloudless, overhanging solitude;
summer days when the wearying, incessant trade winds should sing around
that empty shell and voice its desolation.
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