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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
+
+*******************************************************************
+THERE IS AN HTML EDITION OF THIS TITLE WHICH MAY BE VIEWED AS
+EBOOK (#219) at https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/219
+*******************************************************************
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Heart of Darkness
+
+Author: Joseph Conrad
+
+Release Date: January 9, 2006 [EBook #526]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HEART OF DARKNESS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Judith Boss and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+[Note: See also etext #219 which is a different version of this eBook]
+
+HEART OF DARKNESS
+
+
+By Joseph Conrad
+
+
+
+I
+
+The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of
+the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly
+calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come
+to and wait for the turn of the tide.
+
+The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of
+an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded
+together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails
+of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red
+clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A
+haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness.
+The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed
+condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest,
+and the greatest, town on earth.
+
+The Director of Companies was our captain and our host. We four
+affectionately watched his back as he stood in the bows looking to
+seaward. On the whole river there was nothing that looked half so
+nautical. He resembled a pilot, which to a seaman is trustworthiness
+personified. It was difficult to realize his work was not out there in
+the luminous estuary, but behind him, within the brooding gloom.
+
+Between us there was, as I have already said somewhere, the bond of
+the sea. Besides holding our hearts together through long periods of
+separation, it had the effect of making us tolerant of each other's
+yarns--and even convictions. The Lawyer--the best of old fellows--had,
+because of his many years and many virtues, the only cushion on deck,
+and was lying on the only rug. The Accountant had brought out already a
+box of dominoes, and was toying architecturally with the bones. Marlow
+sat cross-legged right aft, leaning against the mizzen-mast. He had
+sunken cheeks, a yellow complexion, a straight back, an ascetic aspect,
+and, with his arms dropped, the palms of hands outwards, resembled an
+idol. The Director, satisfied the anchor had good hold, made his way
+aft and sat down amongst us. We exchanged a few words lazily. Afterwards
+there was silence on board the yacht. For some reason or other we did
+not begin that game of dominoes. We felt meditative, and fit for nothing
+but placid staring. The day was ending in a serenity of still and
+exquisite brilliance. The water shone pacifically; the sky, without a
+speck, was a benign immensity of unstained light; the very mist on the
+Essex marshes was like a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from the wooded
+rises inland, and draping the low shores in diaphanous folds. Only the
+gloom to the west, brooding over the upper reaches, became more somber
+every minute, as if angered by the approach of the sun.
+
+And at last, in its curved and imperceptible fall, the sun sank low, and
+from glowing white changed to a dull red without rays and without heat,
+as if about to go out suddenly, stricken to death by the touch of that
+gloom brooding over a crowd of men.
+
+Forthwith a change came over the waters, and the serenity became less
+brilliant but more profound. The old river in its broad reach rested
+unruffled at the decline of day, after ages of good service done to the
+race that peopled its banks, spread out in the tranquil dignity of a
+waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth. We looked at the
+venerable stream not in the vivid flush of a short day that comes and
+departs for ever, but in the august light of abiding memories. And
+indeed nothing is easier for a man who has, as the phrase goes,
+"followed the sea" with reverence and affection, than to evoke the
+great spirit of the past upon the lower reaches of the Thames. The tidal
+current runs to and fro in its unceasing service, crowded with memories
+of men and ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the battles
+of the sea. It had known and served all the men of whom the nation is
+proud, from Sir Francis Drake to Sir John Franklin, knights all, titled
+and untitled--the great knights-errant of the sea. It had borne all the
+ships whose names are like jewels flashing in the night of time, from
+the Golden Hind returning with her round flanks full of treasure, to be
+visited by the Queen's Highness and thus pass out of the gigantic tale,
+to the Erebus and Terror, bound on other conquests--and that never
+returned. It had known the ships and the men. They had sailed from
+Deptford, from Greenwich, from Erith--the adventurers and the settlers;
+kings' ships and the ships of men on 'Change; captains, admirals, the
+dark "interlopers" of the Eastern trade, and the commissioned "generals"
+of East India fleets. Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all
+had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch,
+messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the
+sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river
+into the mystery of an unknown earth! . . . The dreams of men, the seed
+of commonwealths, the germs of empires.
+
+The sun set; the dusk fell on the stream, and lights began to appear
+along the shore. The Chapman lighthouse, a three-legged thing erect on a
+mud-flat, shone strongly. Lights of ships moved in the fairway--a great
+stir of lights going up and going down. And farther west on the upper
+reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously on
+the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars.
+
+"And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places
+of the earth."
+
+He was the only man of us who still "followed the sea." The worst that
+could be said of him was that he did not represent his class. He was a
+seaman, but he was a wanderer, too, while most seamen lead, if one may
+so express it, a sedentary life. Their minds are of the stay-at-home
+order, and their home is always with them--the ship; and so is their
+country--the sea. One ship is very much like another, and the sea is
+always the same. In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign
+shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past,
+veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance;
+for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself,
+which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny.
+For the rest, after his hours of work, a casual stroll or a casual spree
+on shore suffices to unfold for him the secret of a whole continent,
+and generally he finds the secret not worth knowing. The yarns of seamen
+have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the
+shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity
+to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not
+inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it
+out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these
+misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination
+of moonshine.
+
+His remark did not seem at all surprising. It was just like Marlow.
+It was accepted in silence. No one took the trouble to grunt even; and
+presently he said, very slow--
+
+"I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here,
+nineteen hundred years ago--the other day. . . . Light came out of this
+river since--you say Knights? Yes; but it is like a running blaze on
+a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the
+flicker--may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But
+darkness was here yesterday. Imagine the feelings of a commander of
+a fine--what d'ye call 'em?--trireme in the Mediterranean, ordered
+suddenly to the north; run overland across the Gauls in a hurry; put in
+charge of one of these craft the legionaries,--a wonderful lot of handy
+men they must have been too--used to build, apparently by the hundred,
+in a month or two, if we may believe what we read. Imagine him here--the
+very end of the world, a sea the color of lead, a sky the color of
+smoke, a kind of ship about as rigid as a concertina--and going up this
+river with stores, or orders, or what you like. Sandbanks, marshes,
+forests, savages,--precious little to eat fit for a civilized man,
+nothing but Thames water to drink. No Falernian wine here, no going
+ashore. Here and there a military camp lost in a wilderness, like a
+needle in a bundle of hay--cold, fog, tempests, disease, exile, and
+death,--death skulking in the air, in the water, in the bush. They must
+have been dying like flies here. Oh yes--he did it. Did it very well,
+too, no doubt, and without thinking much about it either, except
+afterwards to brag of what he had gone through in his time, perhaps.
+They were men enough to face the darkness. And perhaps he was cheered
+by keeping his eye on a chance of promotion to the fleet at Ravenna
+by-and-by, if he had good friends in Rome and survived the awful
+climate. Or think of a decent young citizen in a toga--perhaps too
+much dice, you know--coming out here in the train of some prefect, or
+tax-gatherer, or trader even, to mend his fortunes. Land in a swamp,
+march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the
+utter savagery, had closed round him,--all that mysterious life of the
+wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of
+wild men. There's no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to
+live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And
+it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination
+of the abomination--you know. Imagine the growing regrets, the longing
+to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate."
+
+He paused.
+
+"Mind," he began again, lifting one arm from the elbow, the palm of the
+hand outwards, so that, with his legs folded before him, he had the
+pose of a Buddha preaching in European clothes and without a
+lotus-flower--"Mind, none of us would feel exactly like this. What saves
+us is efficiency--the devotion to efficiency. But these chaps were not
+much account, really. They were no colonists; their administration was
+merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were conquerors, and
+for that you want only brute force--nothing to boast of, when you have
+it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of
+others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to
+be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great
+scale, and men going at it blind--as is very proper for those who tackle
+a darkness. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking
+it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter
+noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too
+much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not
+a sentimental pretense but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the
+idea--something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a
+sacrifice to. . . ."
+
+He broke off. Flames glided in the river, small green flames, red
+flames, white flames, pursuing, overtaking, joining, crossing each
+other--then separating slowly or hastily. The traffic of the great city
+went on in the deepening night upon the sleepless river. We looked on,
+waiting patiently--there was nothing else to do till the end of
+the flood; but it was only after a long silence, when he said, in
+a hesitating voice, "I suppose you fellows remember I did once turn
+fresh-water sailor for a bit," that we knew we were fated, before
+the ebb began to run, to hear about one of Marlow's inconclusive
+experiences.
+
+"I don't want to bother you much with what happened to me personally,"
+he began, showing in this remark the weakness of many tellers of tales
+who seem so often unaware of what their audience would best like to
+hear; "yet to understand the effect of it on me you ought to know how I
+got out there, what I saw, how I went up that river to the place where I
+first met the poor chap. It was the farthest point of navigation and the
+culminating point of my experience. It seemed somehow to throw a kind of
+light on everything about me--and into my thoughts. It was somber enough
+too--and pitiful--not extraordinary in any way--not very clear either.
+No, not very clear. And yet it seemed to throw a kind of light.
+
+"I had then, as you remember, just returned to London after a lot of
+Indian Ocean, Pacific, China Seas--a regular dose of the East--six years
+or so, and I was loafing about, hindering you fellows in your work and
+invading your homes, just as though I had got a heavenly mission to
+civilize you. It was very fine for a time, but after a bit I did get
+tired of resting. Then I began to look for a ship--I should think the
+hardest work on earth. But the ships wouldn't even look at me. And I got
+tired of that game too.
+
+"Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for
+hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all
+the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on
+the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map
+(but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, 'When
+I grow up I will go there.' The North Pole was one of these places, I
+remember. Well, I haven't been there yet, and shall not try now. The
+glamour's off. Other places were scattered about the Equator, and in
+every sort of latitude all over the two hemispheres. I have been in some
+of them, and . . . well, we won't talk about that. But there was one
+yet--the biggest, the most blank, so to speak--that I had a hankering
+after.
+
+"True, by this time it was not a blank space any more. It had got filled
+since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be
+a blank space of delightful mystery--a white patch for a boy to dream
+gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness. But there was in it
+one river especially, a mighty big river, that you could see on the map,
+resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its
+body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the
+depths of the land. And as I looked at the map of it in a shop-window,
+it fascinated me as a snake would a bird--a silly little bird. Then I
+remembered there was a big concern, a Company for trade on that river.
+Dash it all! I thought to myself, they can't trade without using some
+kind of craft on that lot of fresh water--steamboats! Why shouldn't I
+try to get charge of one? I went on along Fleet Street, but could not
+shake off the idea. The snake had charmed me.
+
+"You understand it was a Continental concern, that Trading society; but
+I have a lot of relations living on the Continent, because it's cheap
+and not so nasty as it looks, they say.
+
+"I am sorry to own I began to worry them. This was already a fresh
+departure for me. I was not used to get things that way, you know. I
+always went my own road and on my own legs where I had a mind to go. I
+wouldn't have believed it of myself; but, then--you see--I felt somehow
+I must get there by hook or by crook. So I worried them. The men said
+'My dear fellow,' and did nothing. Then--would you believe it?--I tried
+the women. I, Charlie Marlow, set the women to work--to get a job.
+Heavens! Well, you see, the notion drove me. I had an aunt, a dear
+enthusiastic soul. She wrote: 'It will be delightful. I am ready to do
+anything, anything for you. It is a glorious idea. I know the wife of a
+very high personage in the Administration, and also a man who has lots
+of influence with,' &c., &c. She was determined to make no end of fuss
+to get me appointed skipper of a river steamboat, if such was my fancy.
+
+"I got my appointment--of course; and I got it very quick. It appears
+the Company had received news that one of their captains had been killed
+in a scuffle with the natives. This was my chance, and it made me the
+more anxious to go. It was only months and months afterwards, when I
+made the attempt to recover what was left of the body, that I heard the
+original quarrel arose from a misunderstanding about some hens. Yes,
+two black hens. Fresleven--that was the fellow's name, a Dane--thought
+himself wronged somehow in the bargain, so he went ashore and started to
+hammer the chief of the village with a stick. Oh, it didn't surprise
+me in the least to hear this, and at the same time to be told that
+Fresleven was the gentlest, quietest creature that ever walked on two
+legs. No doubt he was; but he had been a couple of years already out
+there engaged in the noble cause, you know, and he probably felt the
+need at last of asserting his self-respect in some way. Therefore he
+whacked the old nigger mercilessly, while a big crowd of his people
+watched him, thunderstruck, till some man,--I was told the chief's
+son,--in desperation at hearing the old chap yell, made a tentative jab
+with a spear at the white man--and of course it went quite easy between
+the shoulder-blades. Then the whole population cleared into the forest,
+expecting all kinds of calamities to happen, while, on the other hand,
+the steamer Fresleven commanded left also in a bad panic, in charge of
+the engineer, I believe. Afterwards nobody seemed to trouble much
+about Fresleven's remains, till I got out and stepped into his shoes. I
+couldn't let it rest, though; but when an opportunity offered at last to
+meet my predecessor, the grass growing through his ribs was tall enough
+to hide his bones. They were all there. The supernatural being had not
+been touched after he fell. And the village was deserted, the huts gaped
+black, rotting, all askew within the fallen enclosures. A calamity
+had come to it, sure enough. The people had vanished. Mad terror had
+scattered them, men, women, and children, through the bush, and they had
+never returned. What became of the hens I don't know either. I should
+think the cause of progress got them, anyhow. However, through this
+glorious affair I got my appointment, before I had fairly begun to hope
+for it.
+
+"I flew around like mad to get ready, and before forty-eight hours I
+was crossing the Channel to show myself to my employers, and sign the
+contract. In a very few hours I arrived in a city that always makes me
+think of a whited sepulcher. Prejudice no doubt. I had no difficulty in
+finding the Company's offices. It was the biggest thing in the town,
+and everybody I met was full of it. They were going to run an over-sea
+empire, and make no end of coin by trade.
+
+"A narrow and deserted street in deep shadow, high houses, innumerable
+windows with venetian blinds, a dead silence, grass sprouting between
+the stones, imposing carriage archways right and left, immense double
+doors standing ponderously ajar. I slipped through one of these cracks,
+went up a swept and ungarnished staircase, as arid as a desert, and
+opened the first door I came to. Two women, one fat and the other slim,
+sat on straw-bottomed chairs, knitting black wool. The slim one got up
+and walked straight at me--still knitting with downcast eyes--and only
+just as I began to think of getting out of her way, as you would for a
+somnambulist, stood still, and looked up. Her dress was as plain as an
+umbrella-cover, and she turned round without a word and preceded me
+into a waiting-room. I gave my name, and looked about. Deal table in
+the middle, plain chairs all round the walls, on one end a large shining
+map, marked with all the colors of a rainbow. There was a vast amount of
+red--good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work
+is done in there, a deuce of a lot of blue, a little green, smears of
+orange, and, on the East Coast, a purple patch, to show where the jolly
+pioneers of progress drink the jolly lager-beer. However, I wasn't going
+into any of these. I was going into the yellow. Dead in the center. And
+the river was there--fascinating--deadly--like a snake. Ough! A door
+opened, a white-haired secretarial head, but wearing a compassionate
+expression, appeared, and a skinny forefinger beckoned me into the
+sanctuary. Its light was dim, and a heavy writing-desk squatted in
+the middle. From behind that structure came out an impression of pale
+plumpness in a frock-coat. The great man himself. He was five feet
+six, I should judge, and had his grip on the handle-end of ever so many
+millions. He shook hands, I fancy, murmured vaguely, was satisfied with
+my French. Bon voyage.
+
+"In about forty-five seconds I found myself again in the waiting-room
+with the compassionate secretary, who, full of desolation and sympathy,
+made me sign some document. I believe I undertook amongst other things
+not to disclose any trade secrets. Well, I am not going to.
+
+"I began to feel slightly uneasy. You know I am not used to such
+ceremonies, and there was something ominous in the atmosphere. It
+was just as though I had been let into some conspiracy--I don't
+know--something not quite right; and I was glad to get out. In the outer
+room the two women knitted black wool feverishly. People were arriving,
+and the younger one was walking back and forth introducing them. The
+old one sat on her chair. Her flat cloth slippers were propped up on
+a foot-warmer, and a cat reposed on her lap. She wore a starched
+white affair on her head, had a wart on one cheek, and silver-rimmed
+spectacles hung on the tip of her nose. She glanced at me above the
+glasses. The swift and indifferent placidity of that look troubled me.
+Two youths with foolish and cheery countenances were being piloted over,
+and she threw at them the same quick glance of unconcerned wisdom. She
+seemed to know all about them and about me too. An eerie feeling came
+over me. She seemed uncanny and fateful. Often far away there I thought
+of these two, guarding the door of Darkness, knitting black wool as for
+a warm pall, one introducing, introducing continuously to the unknown,
+the other scrutinizing the cheery and foolish faces with unconcerned old
+eyes. Ave! Old knitter of black wool. Morituri te salutant. Not many of
+those she looked at ever saw her again--not half, by a long way.
+
+"There was yet a visit to the doctor. 'A simple formality,' assured me
+the secretary, with an air of taking an immense part in all my sorrows.
+Accordingly a young chap wearing his hat over the left eyebrow, some
+clerk I suppose,--there must have been clerks in the business, though
+the house was as still as a house in a city of the dead,--came from
+somewhere up-stairs, and led me forth. He was shabby and careless, with
+ink-stains on the sleeves of his jacket, and his cravat was large and
+billowy, under a chin shaped like the toe of an old boot. It was a
+little too early for the doctor, so I proposed a drink, and thereupon he
+developed a vein of joviality. As we sat over our vermouths he glorified
+the Company's business, and by-and-by I expressed casually my surprise
+at him not going out there. He became very cool and collected all at
+once. 'I am not such a fool as I look, quoth Plato to his disciples,'
+he said sententiously, emptied his glass with great resolution, and we
+rose.
+
+"The old doctor felt my pulse, evidently thinking of something else
+the while. 'Good, good for there,' he mumbled, and then with a certain
+eagerness asked me whether I would let him measure my head. Rather
+surprised, I said Yes, when he produced a thing like calipers and got
+the dimensions back and front and every way, taking notes carefully. He
+was an unshaven little man in a threadbare coat like a gaberdine, with
+his feet in slippers, and I thought him a harmless fool. 'I always ask
+leave, in the interests of science, to measure the crania of those going
+out there,' he said. 'And when they come back, too?' I asked. 'Oh, I
+never see them,' he remarked; 'and, moreover, the changes take place
+inside, you know.' He smiled, as if at some quiet joke. 'So you are
+going out there. Famous. Interesting too.' He gave me a searching
+glance, and made another note. 'Ever any madness in your family?' he
+asked, in a matter-of-fact tone. I felt very annoyed. 'Is that question
+in the interests of science too?' 'It would be,' he said, without taking
+notice of my irritation, 'interesting for science to watch the mental
+changes of individuals, on the spot, but . . .' 'Are you an alienist?' I
+interrupted. 'Every doctor should be--a little,' answered that original,
+imperturbably. 'I have a little theory which you Messieurs who go out
+there must help me to prove. This is my share in the advantages my
+country shall reap from the possession of such a magnificent dependency.
+The mere wealth I leave to others. Pardon my questions, but you are
+the first Englishman coming under my observation. . . .' I hastened
+to assure him I was not in the least typical. 'If I were,' said I,
+'I wouldn't be talking like this with you.' 'What you say is rather
+profound, and probably erroneous,' he said, with a laugh. 'Avoid
+irritation more than exposure to the sun. Adieu. How do you English
+say, eh? Good-by. Ah! Good-by. Adieu. In the tropics one must before
+everything keep calm.' . . . He lifted a warning forefinger. . . . 'Du
+calme, du calme. Adieu.'
+
+"One thing more remained to do--say good-by to my excellent aunt. I
+found her triumphant. I had a cup of tea--the last decent cup of tea for
+many days--and in a room that most soothingly looked just as you would
+expect a lady's drawing-room to look, we had a long quiet chat by the
+fireside. In the course of these confidences it became quite plain to me
+I had been represented to the wife of the high dignitary, and goodness
+knows to how many more people besides, as an exceptional and gifted
+creature--a piece of good fortune for the Company--a man you don't get
+hold of every day. Good heavens! and I was going to take charge of a
+two-penny-halfpenny river-steamboat with a penny whistle attached! It
+appeared, however, I was also one of the Workers, with a capital--you
+know. Something like an emissary of light, something like a lower sort
+of apostle. There had been a lot of such rot let loose in print and talk
+just about that time, and the excellent woman, living right in the rush
+of all that humbug, got carried off her feet. She talked about 'weaning
+those ignorant millions from their horrid ways,' till, upon my word, she
+made me quite uncomfortable. I ventured to hint that the Company was run
+for profit.
+
+"'You forget, dear Charlie, that the laborer is worthy of his hire,' she
+said, brightly. It's queer how out of touch with truth women are. They
+live in a world of their own, and there had never been anything like it,
+and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to
+set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset. Some confounded
+fact we men have been living contentedly with ever since the day of
+creation would start up and knock the whole thing over.
+
+"After this I got embraced, told to wear flannel, be sure to write
+often, and so on--and I left. In the street--I don't know why--a queer
+feeling came to me that I was an impostor. Odd thing that I, who used to
+clear out for any part of the world at twenty-four hours' notice, with
+less thought than most men give to the crossing of a street, had a
+moment--I won't say of hesitation, but of startled pause, before this
+commonplace affair. The best way I can explain it to you is by saying
+that, for a second or two, I felt as though, instead of going to the
+center of a continent, I were about to set off for the center of the
+earth.
+
+"I left in a French steamer, and she called in every blamed port they
+have out there, for, as far as I could see, the sole purpose of landing
+soldiers and custom-house officers. I watched the coast. Watching a
+coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There
+it is before you--smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or
+savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, 'Come and find out.'
+This one was almost featureless, as if still in the making, with
+an aspect of monotonous grimness. The edge of a colossal jungle, so
+dark-green as to be almost black, fringed with white surf, ran straight,
+like a ruled line, far, far away along a blue sea whose glitter was
+blurred by a creeping mist. The sun was fierce, the land seemed to
+glisten and drip with steam. Here and there grayish-whitish specks
+showed up, clustered inside the white surf, with a flag flying above
+them perhaps. Settlements some centuries old, and still no bigger than
+pin-heads on the untouched expanse of their background. We pounded
+along, stopped, landed soldiers; went on, landed custom-house clerks to
+levy toll in what looked like a God-forsaken wilderness, with a tin shed
+and a flag-pole lost in it; landed more soldiers--to take care of the
+custom-house clerks, presumably. Some, I heard, got drowned in the surf;
+but whether they did or not, nobody seemed particularly to care. They
+were just flung out there, and on we went. Every day the coast
+looked the same, as though we had not moved; but we passed various
+places--trading places--with names like Gran' Bassam Little Popo, names
+that seemed to belong to some sordid farce acted in front of a sinister
+backcloth. The idleness of a passenger, my isolation amongst all these
+men with whom I had no point of contact, the oily and languid sea, the
+uniform somberness of the coast, seemed to keep me away from the truth
+of things, within the toil of a mournful and senseless delusion. The
+voice of the surf heard now and then was a positive pleasure, like the
+speech of a brother. It was something natural, that had its reason, that
+had a meaning. Now and then a boat from the shore gave one a momentary
+contact with reality. It was paddled by black fellows. You could see
+from afar the white of their eyeballs glistening. They shouted, sang;
+their bodies streamed with perspiration; they had faces like grotesque
+masks--these chaps; but they had bone, muscle, a wild vitality, an
+intense energy of movement, that was as natural and true as the surf
+along their coast. They wanted no excuse for being there. They were a
+great comfort to look at. For a time I would feel I belonged still to
+a world of straightforward facts; but the feeling would not last long.
+Something would turn up to scare it away. Once, I remember, we came upon
+a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn't even a shed there, and
+she was shelling the bush. It appears the French had one of their wars
+going on thereabouts. Her ensign dropped limp like a rag; the muzzles
+of the long eight-inch guns stuck out all over the low hull; the greasy,
+slimy swell swung her up lazily and let her down, swaying her thin
+masts. In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was,
+incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the
+eight-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little
+white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble
+screech--and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch
+of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the
+sight; and it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me
+earnestly there was a camp of natives--he called them enemies!--hidden
+out of sight somewhere.
+
+"We gave her her letters (I heard the men in that lonely ship were dying
+of fever at the rate of three a day) and went on. We called at some more
+places with farcical names, where the merry dance of death and trade
+goes on in a still and earthy atmosphere as of an overheated catacomb;
+all along the formless coast bordered by dangerous surf, as if Nature
+herself had tried to ward off intruders; in and out of rivers, streams
+of death in life, whose banks were rotting into mud, whose waters,
+thickened into slime, invaded the contorted mangroves, that seemed to
+writhe at us in the extremity of an impotent despair. Nowhere did we
+stop long enough to get a particularized impression, but the general
+sense of vague and oppressive wonder grew upon me. It was like a weary
+pilgrimage amongst hints for nightmares.
+
+"It was upward of thirty days before I saw the mouth of the big river.
+We anchored off the seat of the government. But my work would not begin
+till some two hundred miles farther on. So as soon as I could I made a
+start for a place thirty miles higher up.
+
+"I had my passage on a little sea-going steamer. Her captain was a
+Swede, and knowing me for a seaman, invited me on the bridge. He was a
+young man, lean, fair, and morose, with lanky hair and a shuffling gait.
+As we left the miserable little wharf, he tossed his head contemptuously
+at the shore. 'Been living there?' he asked. I said, 'Yes.' 'Fine lot
+these government chaps--are they not?' he went on, speaking English
+with great precision and considerable bitterness. 'It is funny what some
+people will do for a few francs a month. I wonder what becomes of that
+kind when it goes up country?' I said to him I expected to see that
+soon. 'So-o-o!' he exclaimed. He shuffled athwart, keeping one eye ahead
+vigilantly. 'Don't be too sure,' he continued. 'The other day I took
+up a man who hanged himself on the road. He was a Swede, too.'
+'Hanged himself! Why, in God's name?' I cried. He kept on looking
+out watchfully. 'Who knows? The sun too much for him, or the country
+perhaps.'
+
+"At last we opened a reach. A rocky cliff appeared, mounds of turned-up
+earth by the shore, houses on a hill, others, with iron roofs, amongst a
+waste of excavations, or hanging to the declivity. A continuous noise of
+the rapids above hovered over this scene of inhabited devastation. A
+lot of people, mostly black and naked, moved about like ants. A jetty
+projected into the river. A blinding sunlight drowned all this at times
+in a sudden recrudescence of glare. 'There's your Company's station,'
+said the Swede, pointing to three wooden barrack-like structures on the
+rocky slope. 'I will send your things up. Four boxes did you say? So.
+Farewell.'
+
+"I came upon a boiler wallowing in the grass, then found a path
+leading up the hill. It turned aside for the bowlders, and also for an
+undersized railway-truck lying there on its back with its wheels in
+the air. One was off. The thing looked as dead as the carcass of some
+animal. I came upon more pieces of decaying machinery, a stack of rusty
+rails. To the left a clump of trees made a shady spot, where dark things
+seemed to stir feebly. I blinked, the path was steep. A horn tooted to
+the right, and I saw the black people run. A heavy and dull detonation
+shook the ground, a puff of smoke came out of the cliff, and that was
+all. No change appeared on the face of the rock. They were building a
+railway. The cliff was not in the way or anything; but this objectless
+blasting was all the work going on.
+
+"A slight clinking behind me made me turn my head. Six black men
+advanced in a file, toiling up the path. They walked erect and slow,
+balancing small baskets full of earth on their heads, and the clink kept
+time with their footsteps. Black rags were wound round their loins, and
+the short ends behind wagged to and fro like tails. I could see every
+rib, the joints of their limbs were like knots in a rope; each had an
+iron collar on his neck, and all were connected together with a chain
+whose bights swung between them, rhythmically clinking. Another report
+from the cliff made me think suddenly of that ship of war I had seen
+firing into a continent. It was the same kind of ominous voice; but
+these men could by no stretch of imagination be called enemies. They
+were called criminals, and the outraged law, like the bursting shells,
+had come to them, an insoluble mystery from over the sea. All their
+meager breasts panted together, the violently dilated nostrils quivered,
+the eyes stared stonily uphill. They passed me within six inches,
+without a glance, with that complete, deathlike indifference of unhappy
+savages. Behind this raw matter one of the reclaimed, the product of
+the new forces at work, strolled despondently, carrying a rifle by its
+middle. He had a uniform jacket with one button off, and seeing a white
+man on the path, hoisted his weapon to his shoulder with alacrity. This
+was simple prudence, white men being so much alike at a distance that
+he could not tell who I might be. He was speedily reassured, and with a
+large, white, rascally grin, and a glance at his charge, seemed to take
+me into partnership in his exalted trust. After all, I also was a part
+of the great cause of these high and just proceedings.
+
+"Instead of going up, I turned and descended to the left. My idea was to
+let that chain-gang get out of sight before I climbed the hill. You know
+I am not particularly tender; I've had to strike and to fend off.
+I've had to resist and to attack sometimes--that's only one way of
+resisting--without counting the exact cost, according to the demands
+of such sort of life as I had blundered into. I've seen the devil of
+violence, and the devil of greed, and the devil of hot desire; but, by
+all the stars! these were strong, lusty, red-eyed devils, that swayed
+and drove men--men, I tell you. But as I stood on this hillside, I
+foresaw that in the blinding sunshine of that land I would become
+acquainted with a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and
+pitiless folly. How insidious he could be, too, I was only to find out
+several months later and a thousand miles farther. For a moment I
+stood appalled, as though by a warning. Finally I descended the hill,
+obliquely, towards the trees I had seen.
+
+"I avoided a vast artificial hole somebody had been digging on the
+slope, the purpose of which I found it impossible to divine. It wasn't
+a quarry or a sandpit, anyhow. It was just a hole. It might have
+been connected with the philanthropic desire of giving the criminals
+something to do. I don't know. Then I nearly fell into a very narrow
+ravine, almost no more than a scar in the hillside. I discovered that
+a lot of imported drainage-pipes for the settlement had been tumbled in
+there. There wasn't one that was not broken. It was a wanton smash-up.
+At last I got under the trees. My purpose was to stroll into the shade
+for a moment; but no sooner within than it seemed to me I had stepped
+into a gloomy circle of some Inferno. The rapids were near, and an
+uninterrupted, uniform, headlong, rushing noise filled the mournful
+stillness of the grove, where not a breath stirred, not a leaf moved,
+with a mysterious sound--as though the tearing pace of the launched
+earth had suddenly become audible.
+
+"Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees, leaning against the
+trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within
+the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair.
+Another mine on the cliff went off, followed by a slight shudder of the
+soil under my feet. The work was going on. The work! And this was the
+place where some of the helpers had withdrawn to die.
+
+"They were dying slowly--it was very clear. They were not enemies, they
+were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now,--nothing but black
+shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish
+gloom. Brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality
+of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar
+food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl
+away and rest. These moribund shapes were free as air--and nearly as
+thin. I began to distinguish the gleam of eyes under the trees. Then,
+glancing down, I saw a face near my hand. The black bones reclined at
+full length with one shoulder against the tree, and slowly the eyelids
+rose and the sunken eyes looked up at me, enormous and vacant, a kind of
+blind, white flicker in the depths of the orbs, which died out slowly.
+The man seemed young--almost a boy--but you know with them it's hard to
+tell. I found nothing else to do but to offer him one of my good Swede's
+ship's biscuits I had in my pocket. The fingers closed slowly on it and
+held--there was no other movement and no other glance. He had tied a
+bit of white worsted round his neck--Why? Where did he get it? Was it a
+badge--an ornament--a charm--a propitiatory act? Was there any idea at
+all connected with it? It looked startling round his black neck, this
+bit of white thread from beyond the seas.
+
+"Near the same tree two more bundles of acute angles sat with their legs
+drawn up. One, with his chin propped on his knees, stared at nothing,
+in an intolerable and appalling manner: his brother phantom rested its
+forehead, as if overcome with a great weariness; and all about others
+were scattered in every pose of contorted collapse, as in some picture
+of a massacre or a pestilence. While I stood horror-struck, one of these
+creatures rose to his hands and knees, and went off on all-fours towards
+the river to drink. He lapped out of his hand, then sat up in the
+sunlight, crossing his shins in front of him, and after a time let his
+woolly head fall on his breastbone.
+
+"I didn't want any more loitering in the shade, and I made haste towards
+the station. When near the buildings I met a white man, in such an
+unexpected elegance of get-up that in the first moment I took him for
+a sort of vision. I saw a high starched collar, white cuffs, a light
+alpaca jacket, snowy trousers, a clear necktie, and varnished boots. No
+hat. Hair parted, brushed, oiled, under a green-lined parasol held in a
+big white hand. He was amazing, and had a penholder behind his ear.
+
+"I shook hands with this miracle, and I learned he was the Company's
+chief accountant, and that all the bookkeeping was done at this station.
+He had come out for a moment, he said, 'to get a breath of fresh air.'
+The expression sounded wonderfully odd, with its suggestion of sedentary
+desk-life. I wouldn't have mentioned the fellow to you at all, only
+it was from his lips that I first heard the name of the man who is
+so indissolubly connected with the memories of that time. Moreover, I
+respected the fellow. Yes; I respected his collars, his vast cuffs,
+his brushed hair. His appearance was certainly that of a hairdresser's
+dummy; but in the great demoralization of the land he kept up
+his appearance. That's backbone. His starched collars and got-up
+shirt-fronts were achievements of character. He had been out nearly
+three years; and, later on, I could not help asking him how he managed
+to sport such linen. He had just the faintest blush, and said modestly,
+'I've been teaching one of the native women about the station. It
+was difficult. She had a distaste for the work.' This man had verily
+accomplished something. And he was devoted to his books, which were in
+apple-pie order.
+
+"Everything else in the station was in a muddle,--heads, things,
+buildings. Strings of dusty niggers with splay feet arrived and
+departed; a stream of manufactured goods, rubbishy cottons, beads,
+and brass-wire sent into the depths of darkness, and in return came a
+precious trickle of ivory.
+
+"I had to wait in the station for ten days--an eternity. I lived in a
+hut in the yard, but to be out of the chaos I would sometimes get into
+the accountant's office. It was built of horizontal planks, and so badly
+put together that, as he bent over his high desk, he was barred from
+neck to heels with narrow strips of sunlight. There was no need to
+open the big shutter to see. It was hot there too; big flies buzzed
+fiendishly, and did not sting, but stabbed. I sat generally on the
+floor, while, of faultless appearance (and even slightly scented),
+perching on a high stool, he wrote, he wrote. Sometimes he stood up for
+exercise. When a truckle-bed with a sick man (some invalided agent from
+up-country) was put in there, he exhibited a gentle annoyance. 'The
+groans of this sick person,' he said, 'distract my attention. And without
+that it is extremely difficult to guard against clerical errors in this
+climate.'
+
+"One day he remarked, without lifting his head, 'In the interior you
+will no doubt meet Mr. Kurtz.' On my asking who Mr. Kurtz was, he
+said he was a first-class agent; and seeing my disappointment at
+this information, he added slowly, laying down his pen, 'He is a very
+remarkable person.' Further questions elicited from him that Mr. Kurtz
+was at present in charge of a trading post, a very important one, in the
+true ivory-country, at 'the very bottom of there. Sends in as much ivory
+as all the others put together. . . .' He began to write again. The sick
+man was too ill to groan. The flies buzzed in a great peace.
+
+"Suddenly there was a growing murmur of voices and a great tramping of
+feet. A caravan had come in. A violent babble of uncouth sounds burst
+out on the other side of the planks. All the carriers were speaking
+together, and in the midst of the uproar the lamentable voice of the
+chief agent was heard 'giving it up' tearfully for the twentieth time
+that day. . . . He rose slowly. 'What a frightful row,' he said. He
+crossed the room gently to look at the sick man, and returning, said to
+me, 'He does not hear.' 'What! Dead?' I asked, startled. 'No, not yet,'
+he answered, with great composure. Then, alluding with a toss of the
+head to the tumult in the station-yard, 'When one has got to make
+correct entries, one comes to hate those savages--hate them to the
+death.' He remained thoughtful for a moment. 'When you see Mr. Kurtz,'
+he went on, 'tell him from me that everything here'--he glanced at the
+desk--'is very satisfactory. I don't like to write to him--with those
+messengers of ours you never know who may get hold of your letter--at
+that Central Station.' He stared at me for a moment with his mild,
+bulging eyes. 'Oh, he will go far, very far,' he began again. 'He
+will be a somebody in the Administration before long. They, above--the
+Council in Europe, you know--mean him to be.'
+
+"He turned to his work. The noise outside had ceased, and presently
+in going out I stopped at the door. In the steady buzz of flies the
+homeward-bound agent was lying flushed and insensible; the other,
+bent over his books, was making correct entries of perfectly correct
+transactions; and fifty feet below the doorstep I could see the still
+tree-tops of the grove of death.
+
+"Next day I left that station at last, with a caravan of sixty men, for
+a two-hundred-mile tramp.
+
+"No use telling you much about that. Paths, paths, everywhere; a
+stamped-in network of paths spreading over the empty land, through
+long grass, through burnt grass, through thickets, down and up chilly
+ravines, up and down stony hills ablaze with heat; and a solitude, a
+solitude, nobody, not a hut. The population had cleared out a long
+time ago. Well, if a lot of mysterious niggers armed with all kinds of
+fearful weapons suddenly took to traveling on the road between Deal and
+Gravesend, catching the yokels right and left to carry heavy loads for
+them, I fancy every farm and cottage thereabouts would get empty very
+soon. Only here the dwellings were gone too. Still I passed through
+several abandoned villages. There's something pathetically childish in
+the ruins of grass walls. Day after day, with the stamp and shuffle of
+sixty pair of bare feet behind me, each pair under a 60-lb. load. Camp,
+cook, sleep, strike camp, march. Now and then a carrier dead in harness,
+at rest in the long grass near the path, with an empty water-gourd and
+his long staff lying by his side. A great silence around and above.
+Perhaps on some quiet night the tremor of far-off drums, sinking,
+swelling, a tremor vast, faint; a sound weird, appealing, suggestive,
+and wild--and perhaps with as profound a meaning as the sound of bells
+in a Christian country. Once a white man in an unbuttoned uniform,
+camping on the path with an armed escort of lank Zanzibaris, very
+hospitable and festive--not to say drunk. Was looking after the upkeep
+of the road, he declared. Can't say I saw any road or any upkeep, unless
+the body of a middle-aged negro, with a bullet-hole in the forehead,
+upon which I absolutely stumbled three miles farther on, may be
+considered as a permanent improvement. I had a white companion too, not
+a bad chap, but rather too fleshy and with the exasperating habit of
+fainting on the hot hillsides, miles away from the least bit of shade
+and water. Annoying, you know, to hold your own coat like a parasol over
+a man's head while he is coming-to. I couldn't help asking him once what
+he meant by coming there at all. 'To make money, of course. What do you
+think?' he said, scornfully. Then he got fever, and had to be carried in
+a hammock slung under a pole. As he weighed sixteen stone I had no end
+of rows with the carriers. They jibbed, ran away, sneaked off with their
+loads in the night--quite a mutiny. So, one evening, I made a speech in
+English with gestures, not one of which was lost to the sixty pairs of
+eyes before me, and the next morning I started the hammock off in front
+all right. An hour afterwards I came upon the whole concern wrecked in
+a bush--man, hammock, groans, blankets, horrors. The heavy pole had
+skinned his poor nose. He was very anxious for me to kill somebody,
+but there wasn't the shadow of a carrier near. I remembered the old
+doctor,--'It would be interesting for science to watch the mental
+changes of individuals, on the spot.' I felt I was becoming
+scientifically interesting. However, all that is to no purpose. On the
+fifteenth day I came in sight of the big river again, and hobbled into
+the Central Station. It was on a back water surrounded by scrub and
+forest, with a pretty border of smelly mud on one side, and on the three
+others inclosed by a crazy fence of rushes. A neglected gap was all the
+gate it had, and the first glance at the place was enough to let you see
+the flabby devil was running that show. White men with long staves in
+their hands appeared languidly from amongst the buildings, strolling up
+to take a look at me, and then retired out of sight somewhere. One of
+them, a stout, excitable chap with black mustaches, informed me with
+great volubility and many digressions, as soon as I told him who I was,
+that my steamer was at the bottom of the river. I was thunderstruck.
+What, how, why? Oh, it was 'all right.' The 'manager himself' was there.
+All quite correct. 'Everybody had behaved splendidly! splendidly!'--'you
+must,' he said in agitation, 'go and see the general manager at once. He
+is waiting!'
+
+"I did not see the real significance of that wreck at once. I fancy I
+see it now, but I am not sure--not at all. Certainly the affair was too
+stupid--when I think of it--to be altogether natural. Still. . . . But
+at the moment it presented itself simply as a confounded nuisance. The
+steamer was sunk. They had started two days before in a sudden hurry
+up the river with the manager on board, in charge of some volunteer
+skipper, and before they had been out three hours they tore the bottom
+out of her on stones, and she sank near the south bank. I asked myself
+what I was to do there, now my boat was lost. As a matter of fact, I had
+plenty to do in fishing my command out of the river. I had to set about
+it the very next day. That, and the repairs when I brought the pieces to
+the station, took some months.
+
+"My first interview with the manager was curious. He did not ask me to
+sit down after my twenty-mile walk that morning. He was commonplace in
+complexion, in features, in manners, and in voice. He was of middle
+size and of ordinary build. His eyes, of the usual blue, were perhaps
+remarkably cold, and he certainly could make his glance fall on one as
+trenchant and heavy as an ax. But even at these times the rest of his
+person seemed to disclaim the intention. Otherwise there was only
+an indefinable, faint expression of his lips, something stealthy--a
+smile--not a smile--I remember it, but I can't explain. It was
+unconscious, this smile was, though just after he had said something it
+got intensified for an instant. It came at the end of his speeches like
+a seal applied on the words to make the meaning of the commonest phrase
+appear absolutely inscrutable. He was a common trader, from his youth
+up employed in these parts--nothing more. He was obeyed, yet he inspired
+neither love nor fear, nor even respect. He inspired uneasiness. That
+was it! Uneasiness. Not a definite mistrust--just uneasiness--nothing
+more. You have no idea how effective such a . . . a . . . faculty can
+be. He had no genius for organizing, for initiative, or for order even.
+That was evident in such things as the deplorable state of the station.
+He had no learning, and no intelligence. His position had come to
+him--why? Perhaps because he was never ill . . . He had served three
+terms of three years out there . . . Because triumphant health in the
+general rout of constitutions is a kind of power in itself. When he went
+home on leave he rioted on a large scale--pompously. Jack ashore--with
+a difference--in externals only. This one could gather from his casual
+talk. He originated nothing, he could keep the routine going--that's
+all. But he was great. He was great by this little thing that it was
+impossible to tell what could control such a man. He never gave that
+secret away. Perhaps there was nothing within him. Such a suspicion
+made one pause--for out there there were no external checks. Once when
+various tropical diseases had laid low almost every 'agent' in the
+station, he was heard to say, 'Men who come out here should have no
+entrails.' He sealed the utterance with that smile of his, as though
+it had been a door opening into a darkness he had in his keeping.
+You fancied you had seen things--but the seal was on. When annoyed at
+meal-times by the constant quarrels of the white men about precedence,
+he ordered an immense round table to be made, for which a special house
+had to be built. This was the station's mess-room. Where he sat was the
+first place--the rest were nowhere. One felt this to be his unalterable
+conviction. He was neither civil nor uncivil. He was quiet. He allowed
+his 'boy'--an overfed young negro from the coast--to treat the white
+men, under his very eyes, with provoking insolence.
+
+"He began to speak as soon as he saw me. I had been very long on the
+road. He could not wait. Had to start without me. The up-river stations
+had to be relieved. There had been so many delays already that he did
+not know who was dead and who was alive, and how they got on--and so on,
+and so on. He paid no attention to my explanations, and, playing with
+a stick of sealing-wax, repeated several times that the situation
+was 'very grave, very grave.' There were rumors that a very important
+station was in jeopardy, and its chief, Mr. Kurtz, was ill. Hoped it was
+not true. Mr. Kurtz was . . . I felt weary and irritable. Hang Kurtz,
+I thought. I interrupted him by saying I had heard of Mr. Kurtz on the
+coast. 'Ah! So they talk of him down there,' he murmured to himself.
+Then he began again, assuring me Mr. Kurtz was the best agent he had, an
+exceptional man, of the greatest importance to the Company; therefore
+I could understand his anxiety. He was, he said, 'very, very uneasy.'
+Certainly he fidgeted on his chair a good deal, exclaimed, 'Ah, Mr.
+Kurtz!' broke the stick of sealing-wax and seemed dumbfounded by the
+accident. Next thing he wanted to know 'how long it would take to' . . .
+I interrupted him again. Being hungry, you know, and kept on my feet
+too, I was getting savage. 'How could I tell,' I said. 'I hadn't even
+seen the wreck yet--some months, no doubt.' All this talk seemed to me
+so futile. 'Some months,' he said. 'Well, let us say three months before
+we can make a start. Yes. That ought to do the affair.' I flung out
+of his hut (he lived all alone in a clay hut with a sort of veranda)
+muttering to myself my opinion of him. He was a chattering idiot.
+Afterwards I took it back when it was borne in upon me startlingly
+with what extreme nicety he had estimated the time requisite for the
+'affair.'
+
+"I went to work the next day, turning, so to speak, my back on that
+station. In that way only it seemed to me I could keep my hold on the
+redeeming facts of life. Still, one must look about sometimes; and then
+I saw this station, these men strolling aimlessly about in the sunshine
+of the yard. I asked myself sometimes what it all meant. They wandered
+here and there with their absurd long staves in their hands, like a lot
+of faithless pilgrims bewitched inside a rotten fence. The word 'ivory'
+rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were
+praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a
+whiff from some corpse. By Jove! I've never seen anything so unreal in
+my life. And outside, the silent wilderness surrounding this cleared
+speck on the earth struck me as something great and invincible, like
+evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic
+invasion.
+
+"Oh, these months! Well, never mind. Various things happened. One
+evening a grass shed full of calico, cotton prints, beads, and I don't
+know what else, burst into a blaze so suddenly that you would have
+thought the earth had opened to let an avenging fire consume all that
+trash. I was smoking my pipe quietly by my dismantled steamer, and saw
+them all cutting capers in the light, with their arms lifted high, when
+the stout man with mustaches came tearing down to the river, a tin
+pail in his hand, assured me that everybody was 'behaving splendidly,
+splendidly,' dipped about a quart of water and tore back again. I
+noticed there was a hole in the bottom of his pail.
+
+"I strolled up. There was no hurry. You see the thing had gone off like
+a box of matches. It had been hopeless from the very first. The flame
+had leaped high, driven everybody back, lighted up everything--and
+collapsed. The shed was already a heap of embers glowing fiercely. A
+nigger was being beaten near by. They said he had caused the fire in
+some way; be that as it may, he was screeching most horribly. I saw him,
+later on, for several days, sitting in a bit of shade looking very sick
+and trying to recover himself: afterwards he arose and went out--and
+the wilderness without a sound took him into its bosom again. As I
+approached the glow from the dark I found myself at the back of two men,
+talking. I heard the name of Kurtz pronounced, then the words, 'take
+advantage of this unfortunate accident.' One of the men was the manager.
+I wished him a good evening. 'Did you ever see anything like it--eh? it
+is incredible,' he said, and walked off. The other man remained. He was
+a first-class agent, young, gentlemanly, a bit reserved, with a forked
+little beard and a hooked nose. He was stand-offish with the other
+agents, and they on their side said he was the manager's spy upon them.
+As to me, I had hardly ever spoken to him before. We got into talk, and
+by-and-by we strolled away from the hissing ruins. Then he asked me to
+his room, which was in the main building of the station. He struck
+a match, and I perceived that this young aristocrat had not only a
+silver-mounted dressing-case but also a whole candle all to himself.
+Just at that time the manager was the only man supposed to have any
+right to candles. Native mats covered the clay walls; a collection of
+spears, assegais, shields, knives was hung up in trophies. The business
+intrusted to this fellow was the making of bricks--so I had been
+informed; but there wasn't a fragment of a brick anywhere in the
+station, and he had been there more than a year--waiting. It seems he
+could not make bricks without something, I don't know what--straw maybe.
+Anyways, it could not be found there, and as it was not likely to be
+sent from Europe, it did not appear clear to me what he was waiting for.
+An act of special creation perhaps. However, they were all waiting--all
+the sixteen or twenty pilgrims of them--for something; and upon my word
+it did not seem an uncongenial occupation, from the way they took it,
+though the only thing that ever came to them was disease--as far as I
+could see. They beguiled the time by backbiting and intriguing against
+each other in a foolish kind of way. There was an air of plotting about
+that station, but nothing came of it, of course. It was as unreal as
+everything else--as the philanthropic pretense of the whole concern, as
+their talk, as their government, as their show of work. The only real
+feeling was a desire to get appointed to a trading-post where ivory
+was to be had, so that they could earn percentages. They intrigued
+and slandered and hated each other only on that account,--but as to
+effectually lifting a little finger--oh, no. By heavens! there is
+something after all in the world allowing one man to steal a horse while
+another must not look at a halter. Steal a horse straight out. Very
+well. He has done it. Perhaps he can ride. But there is a way of looking
+at a halter that would provoke the most charitable of saints into a
+kick.
+
+"I had no idea why he wanted to be sociable, but as we chatted in there
+it suddenly occurred to me the fellow was trying to get at something--in
+fact, pumping me. He alluded constantly to Europe, to the people I was
+supposed to know there--putting leading questions as to my acquaintances
+in the sepulchral city, and so on. His little eyes glittered like
+mica discs--with curiosity,--though he tried to keep up a bit of
+superciliousness. At first I was astonished, but very soon I became
+awfully curious to see what he would find out from me. I couldn't
+possibly imagine what I had in me to make it worth his while. It was
+very pretty to see how he baffled himself, for in truth my body was full
+of chills, and my head had nothing in it but that wretched steamboat
+business. It was evident he took me for a perfectly shameless
+prevaricator. At last he got angry, and to conceal a movement of furious
+annoyance, he yawned. I rose. Then I noticed a small sketch in oils,
+on a panel, representing a woman, draped and blindfolded, carrying a
+lighted torch. The background was somber--almost black. The movement of
+the woman was stately, and the effect of the torchlight on the face was
+sinister.
+
+"It arrested me, and he stood by civilly, holding a half-pint champagne
+bottle (medical comforts) with the candle stuck in it. To my question he
+said Mr. Kurtz had painted this--in this very station more than a year
+ago--while waiting for means to go to his trading-post. 'Tell me, pray,'
+said I, 'who is this Mr. Kurtz?'
+
+"'The chief of the Inner Station,' he answered in a short tone, looking
+away. 'Much obliged,' I said, laughing. 'And you are the brickmaker of
+the Central Station. Everyone knows that.' He was silent for a while.
+'He is a prodigy,' he said at last. 'He is an emissary of pity, and
+science, and progress, and devil knows what else. We want,' he began
+to declaim suddenly, 'for the guidance of the cause intrusted to us by
+Europe, so to speak, higher intelligence, wide sympathies, a singleness
+of purpose.' 'Who says that?' I asked. 'Lots of them,' he replied. 'Some
+even write that; and so _he_ comes here, a special being, as you ought
+to know.' 'Why ought I to know?' I interrupted, really surprised. He
+paid no attention. 'Yes. To-day he is chief of the best station, next
+year he will be assistant-manager, two years more and . . . but I dare
+say you know what he will be in two years' time. You are of the new
+gang--the gang of virtue. The same people who sent him specially also
+recommended you. Oh, don't say no. I've my own eyes to trust.' Light
+dawned upon me. My dear aunt's influential acquaintances were producing
+an unexpected effect upon that young man. I nearly burst into a laugh.
+'Do you read the Company's confidential correspondence?' I asked. He
+hadn't a word to say. It was great fun. 'When Mr. Kurtz,' I continued
+severely, 'is General Manager, you won't have the opportunity.'
+
+"He blew the candle out suddenly, and we went outside. The moon had
+risen. Black figures strolled about listlessly, pouring water on
+the glow, whence proceeded a sound of hissing; steam ascended in the
+moonlight, the beaten nigger groaned somewhere. 'What a row the brute
+makes!' said the indefatigable man with the mustaches, appearing
+near us. 'Serve him right. Transgression--punishment--bang! Pitiless,
+pitiless. That's the only way. This will prevent all conflagrations
+for the future. I was just telling the manager . . .' He noticed my
+companion, and became crestfallen all at once. 'Not in bed yet,'
+he said, with a kind of servile heartiness; 'it's so natural. Ha!
+Danger--agitation.' He vanished. I went on to the river-side, and
+the other followed me. I heard a scathing murmur at my ear, 'Heap
+of muffs--go to.' The pilgrims could be seen in knots gesticulating,
+discussing. Several had still their staves in their hands. I verily
+believe they took these sticks to bed with them. Beyond the fence the
+forest stood up spectrally in the moonlight, and through the dim stir,
+through the faint sounds of that lamentable courtyard, the silence of
+the land went home to one's very heart,--its mystery, its greatness,
+the amazing reality of its concealed life. The hurt nigger moaned feebly
+somewhere near by, and then fetched a deep sigh that made me mend my
+pace away from there. I felt a hand introducing itself under my arm.
+'My dear sir,' said the fellow, 'I don't want to be misunderstood, and
+especially by you, who will see Mr. Kurtz long before I can have that
+pleasure. I wouldn't like him to get a false idea of my
+disposition. . . .'
+
+
+"I let him run on, this _papier-mache_ Mephistopheles, and it seemed to
+me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find
+nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe. He, don't you see, had
+been planning to be assistant-manager by-and-by under the present man,
+and I could see that the coming of that Kurtz had upset them both not a
+little. He talked precipitately, and I did not try to stop him. I had my
+shoulders against the wreck of my steamer, hauled up on the slope like a
+carcass of some big river animal. The smell of mud, of primeval mud,
+by Jove! was in my nostrils, the high stillness of primeval forest was
+before my eyes; there were shiny patches on the black creek. The moon
+had spread over everything a thin layer of silver--over the rank grass,
+over the mud, upon the wall of matted vegetation standing higher than
+the wall of a temple, over the great river I could see through a somber
+gap glittering, glittering, as it flowed broadly by without a murmur.
+All this was great, expectant, mute, while the man jabbered about
+himself. I wondered whether the stillness on the face of the immensity
+looking at us two were meant as an appeal or as a menace. What were we
+who had strayed in here? Could we handle that dumb thing, or would it
+handle us? I felt how big, how confoundedly big, was that thing that
+couldn't talk, and perhaps was deaf as well. What was in there? I could
+see a little ivory coming out from there, and I had heard Mr. Kurtz was
+in there. I had heard enough about it too--God knows! Yet somehow it
+didn't bring any image with it--no more than if I had been told an angel
+or a fiend was in there. I believed it in the same way one of you might
+believe there are inhabitants in the planet Mars. I knew once a Scotch
+sailmaker who was certain, dead sure, there were people in Mars. If you
+asked him for some idea how they looked and behaved, he would get shy
+and mutter something about 'walking on all-fours.' If you as much as
+smiled, he would--though a man of sixty--offer to fight you. I would not
+have gone so far as to fight for Kurtz, but I went for him near enough
+to a lie. You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because
+I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me.
+There is a taint of death, a flavor of mortality in lies,--which is
+exactly what I hate and detest in the world--what I want to forget.
+It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do.
+Temperament, I suppose. Well, I went near enough to it by letting the
+young fool there believe anything he liked to imagine as to my influence
+in Europe. I became in an instant as much of a pretense as the rest of
+the bewitched pilgrims. This simply because I had a notion it somehow
+would be of help to that Kurtz whom at the time I did not see--you
+understand. He was just a word for me. I did not see the man in the name
+any more than you do. Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see
+anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream--making a vain
+attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation,
+that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of
+struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which
+is of the very essence of dreams. . . ."
+
+He was silent for a while.
+
+". . . No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the
+life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence,--that which
+makes its truth, its meaning--its subtle and penetrating essence. It is
+impossible. We live, as we dream--alone. . . ."
+
+He paused again as if reflecting, then added--"Of course in this you
+fellows see more than I could then. You see me, whom you know. . . ."
+
+It had become so pitch dark that we listeners could hardly see one
+another. For a long time already he, sitting apart, had been no more
+to us than a voice. There was not a word from anybody. The others might
+have been asleep, but I was awake. I listened, I listened on the watch
+for the sentence, for the word, that would give me the clew to the
+faint uneasiness inspired by this narrative that seemed to shape itself
+without human lips in the heavy night-air of the river.
+
+". . . Yes--I let him run on," Marlow began again, "and think what
+he pleased about the powers that were behind me. I did! And there was
+nothing behind me! There was nothing but that wretched, old, mangled
+steamboat I was leaning against, while he talked fluently about 'the
+necessity for every man to get on.' 'And when one comes out here, you
+conceive, it is not to gaze at the moon.' Mr. Kurtz was a 'universal
+genius,' but even a genius would find it easier to work with 'adequate
+tools--intelligent men.' He did not make bricks--why, there was a
+physical impossibility in the way--as I was well aware; and if he
+did secretarial work for the manager, it was because 'no sensible man
+rejects wantonly the confidence of his superiors.' Did I see it? I saw
+it. What more did I want? What I really wanted was rivets, by heaven!
+Rivets. To get on with the work--to stop the hole. Rivets I
+wanted. There were cases of them down at the coast--cases--piled
+up--burst--split! You kicked a loose rivet at every second step in that
+station yard on the hillside. Rivets had rolled into the grove of death.
+You could fill your pockets with rivets for the trouble of stooping
+down--and there wasn't one rivet to be found where it was wanted. We had
+plates that would do, but nothing to fasten them with. And every week
+the messenger, a lone negro, letter-bag on shoulder and staff in hand,
+left our station for the coast. And several times a week a coast caravan
+came in with trade goods,--ghastly glazed calico that made you shudder
+only to look at it, glass beads value about a penny a quart, confounded
+spotted cotton handkerchiefs. And no rivets. Three carriers could have
+brought all that was wanted to set that steamboat afloat.
+
+"He was becoming confidential now, but I fancy my unresponsive attitude
+must have exasperated him at last, for he judged it necessary to inform
+me he feared neither God nor devil, let alone any mere man. I said I
+could see that very well, but what I wanted was a certain quantity of
+rivets--and rivets were what really Mr. Kurtz wanted, if he had only
+known it. Now letters went to the coast every week. . . . 'My dear
+sir,' he cried, 'I write from dictation.' I demanded rivets. There was
+a way--for an intelligent man. He changed his manner; became very
+cold, and suddenly began to talk about a hippopotamus; wondered whether
+sleeping on board the steamer (I stuck to my salvage night and day)
+I wasn't disturbed. There was an old hippo that had the bad habit of
+getting out on the bank and roaming at night over the station grounds.
+The pilgrims used to turn out in a body and empty every rifle they could
+lay hands on at him. Some even had sat up o' nights for him. All this
+energy was wasted, though. 'That animal has a charmed life,' he said;
+'but you can say this only of brutes in this country. No man--you
+apprehend me?--no man here bears a charmed life.' He stood there for
+a moment in the moonlight with his delicate hooked nose set a little
+askew, and his mica eyes glittering without a wink, then, with a curt
+Good night, he strode off. I could see he was disturbed and considerably
+puzzled, which made me feel more hopeful than I had been for days. It
+was a great comfort to turn from that chap to my influential friend, the
+battered, twisted, ruined, tin-pot steamboat. I clambered on board. She
+rang under my feet like an empty Huntley & Palmer biscuit-tin kicked
+along a gutter; she was nothing so solid in make, and rather less pretty
+in shape, but I had expended enough hard work on her to make me love
+her. No influential friend would have served me better. She had given
+me a chance to come out a bit--to find out what I could do. No, I don't
+like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that
+can be done. I don't like work--no man does--but I like what is in the
+work,--the chance to find yourself. Your own reality--for yourself, not
+for others--what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere
+show, and never can tell what it really means.
+
+"I was not surprised to see somebody sitting aft, on the deck, with
+his legs dangling over the mud. You see I rather chummed with the few
+mechanics there were in that station, whom the other pilgrims naturally
+despised--on account of their imperfect manners, I suppose. This was the
+foreman--a boiler-maker by trade--a good worker. He was a lank, bony,
+yellow-faced man, with big intense eyes. His aspect was worried, and his
+head was as bald as the palm of my hand; but his hair in falling seemed
+to have stuck to his chin, and had prospered in the new locality,
+for his beard hung down to his waist. He was a widower with six young
+children (he had left them in charge of a sister of his to come out
+there), and the passion of his life was pigeon-flying. He was an
+enthusiast and a connoisseur. He would rave about pigeons. After work
+hours he used sometimes to come over from his hut for a talk about his
+children and his pigeons; at work, when he had to crawl in the mud under
+the bottom of the steamboat, he would tie up that beard of his in a kind
+of white serviette he brought for the purpose. It had loops to go over
+his ears. In the evening he could be seen squatted on the bank rinsing
+that wrapper in the creek with great care, then spreading it solemnly on
+a bush to dry.
+
+"I slapped him on the back and shouted, 'We shall have rivets!' He
+scrambled to his feet exclaiming 'No! Rivets!' as though he couldn't
+believe his ears. Then in a low voice, 'You . . . eh?' I don't know why
+we behaved like lunatics. I put my finger to the side of my nose and
+nodded mysteriously. 'Good for you!' he cried, snapped his fingers above
+his head, lifting one foot. I tried a jig. We capered on the iron deck.
+A frightful clatter came out of that hulk, and the virgin forest on
+the other bank of the creek sent it back in a thundering roll upon the
+sleeping station. It must have made some of the pilgrims sit up in their
+hovels. A dark figure obscured the lighted doorway of the manager's hut,
+vanished, then, a second or so after, the doorway itself vanished too.
+We stopped, and the silence driven away by the stamping of our feet
+flowed back again from the recesses of the land. The great wall of
+vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass of trunks, branches, leaves,
+boughs, festoons, motionless in the moonlight, was like a rioting
+invasion of soundless life, a rolling wave of plants, piled up, crested,
+ready to topple over the creek, to sweep every little man of us out
+of his little existence. And it moved not. A deadened burst of mighty
+splashes and snorts reached us from afar, as though an ichthyosaurus had
+been taking a bath of glitter in the great river. 'After all,' said the
+boiler-maker in a reasonable tone, 'why shouldn't we get the rivets?'
+Why not, indeed! I did not know of any reason why we shouldn't. 'They'll
+come in three weeks,' I said confidently.
+
+"But they didn't. Instead of rivets there came an invasion, an
+infliction, a visitation. It came in sections during the next three
+weeks, each section headed by a donkey carrying a white man in new
+clothes and tan shoes, bowing from that elevation right and left to the
+impressed pilgrims. A quarrelsome band of footsore sulky niggers trod on
+the heels of the donkeys; a lot of tents, camp-stools, tin boxes, white
+cases, brown bales would be shot down in the courtyard, and the air of
+mystery would deepen a little over the muddle of the station. Five such
+installments came, with their absurd air of disorderly flight with the
+loot of innumerable outfit shops and provision stores, that, one
+would think, they were lugging, after a raid, into the wilderness for
+equitable division. It was an inextricable mess of things decent in
+themselves but that human folly made look like the spoils of thieving.
+
+"This devoted band called itself the Eldorado Exploring Expedition, and
+I believe they were sworn to secrecy. Their talk, however, was the talk
+of sordid buccaneers: it was reckless without hardihood, greedy without
+audacity, and cruel without courage; there was not an atom of foresight
+or of serious intention in the whole batch of them, and they did not
+seem aware these things are wanted for the work of the world. To tear
+treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more
+moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into
+a safe. Who paid the expenses of the noble enterprise I don't know; but
+the uncle of our manager was leader of that lot.
+
+"In exterior he resembled a butcher in a poor neighborhood, and his eyes
+had a look of sleepy cunning. He carried his fat paunch with ostentation
+on his short legs, and during the time his gang infested the station
+spoke to no one but his nephew. You could see these two roaming about
+all day long with their heads close together in an everlasting confab.
+
+"I had given up worrying myself about the rivets. One's capacity for
+that kind of folly is more limited than you would suppose. I said
+Hang!--and let things slide. I had plenty of time for meditation,
+and now and then I would give some thought to Kurtz. I wasn't very
+interested in him. No. Still, I was curious to see whether this man, who
+had come out equipped with moral ideas of some sort, would climb to the
+top after all, and how he would set about his work when there."
+
+
+II
+
+
+"One evening as I was lying flat on the deck of my steamboat, I heard
+voices approaching--and there were the nephew and the uncle strolling
+along the bank. I laid my head on my arm again, and had nearly lost
+myself in a doze, when somebody said in my ear, as it were: 'I am as
+harmless as a little child, but I don't like to be dictated to. Am I the
+manager--or am I not? I was ordered to send him there. It's incredible.'
+. . . I became aware that the two were standing on the shore alongside
+the forepart of the steamboat, just below my head. I did not move; it
+did not occur to me to move: I was sleepy. 'It _is_ unpleasant,' grunted
+the uncle. 'He has asked the Administration to be sent there,' said the
+other, 'with the idea of showing what he could do; and I was instructed
+accordingly. Look at the influence that man must have. Is it not
+frightful?' They both agreed it was frightful, then made several bizarre
+remarks: 'Make rain and fine weather--one man--the Council--by the
+nose'--bits of absurd sentences that got the better of my drowsiness,
+so that I had pretty near the whole of my wits about me when the uncle
+said, 'The climate may do away with this difficulty for you. Is he alone
+there?' 'Yes,' answered the manager; 'he sent his assistant down the
+river with a note to me in these terms: "Clear this poor devil out of
+the country, and don't bother sending more of that sort. I had rather be
+alone than have the kind of men you can dispose of with me." It was more
+than a year ago. Can you imagine such impudence!' 'Anything since
+then?' asked the other, hoarsely. 'Ivory,' jerked the nephew; 'lots
+of it--prime sort--lots--most annoying, from him.' 'And with that?'
+questioned the heavy rumble. 'Invoice,' was the reply fired out, so to
+speak. Then silence. They had been talking about Kurtz.
+
+"I was broad awake by this time, but, lying perfectly at ease, remained
+still, having no inducement to change my position. 'How did that ivory
+come all this way?' growled the elder man, who seemed very vexed. The
+other explained that it had come with a fleet of canoes in charge of an
+English half-caste clerk Kurtz had with him; that Kurtz had apparently
+intended to return himself, the station being by that time bare of goods
+and stores, but after coming three hundred miles, had suddenly decided
+to go back, which he started to do alone in a small dug-out with four
+paddlers, leaving the half-caste to continue down the river with the
+ivory. The two fellows there seemed astounded at anybody attempting such
+a thing. They were at a loss for an adequate motive. As to me, I seemed
+to see Kurtz for the first time. It was a distinct glimpse: the dug-out,
+four paddling savages, and the lone white man turning his back suddenly
+on the headquarters, on relief, on thoughts of home--perhaps; setting
+his face towards the depths of the wilderness, towards his empty and
+desolate station. I did not know the motive. Perhaps he was just simply
+a fine fellow who stuck to his work for its own sake. His name, you
+understand, had not been pronounced once. He was 'that man.' The
+half-caste, who, as far as I could see, had conducted a difficult
+trip with great prudence and pluck, was invariably alluded to as 'that
+scoundrel.' The 'scoundrel' had reported that the 'man' had been very
+ill--had recovered imperfectly. . . . The two below me moved away then a
+few paces, and strolled back and forth at some little distance. I heard:
+'Military post--doctor--two hundred miles--quite alone now--unavoidable
+delays--nine months--no news--strange rumors.' They approached again,
+just as the manager was saying, 'No one, as far as I know, unless a
+species of wandering trader--a pestilential fellow, snapping ivory from
+the natives.' Who was it they were talking about now? I gathered in
+snatches that this was some man supposed to be in Kurtz's district, and
+of whom the manager did not approve. 'We will not be free from unfair
+competition till one of these fellows is hanged for an example,'
+he said. 'Certainly,' grunted the other; 'get him hanged! Why not?
+Anything--anything can be done in this country. That's what I say;
+nobody here, you understand, _here_, can endanger your position. And
+why? You stand the climate--you outlast them all. The danger is in
+Europe; but there before I left I took care to--' They moved off and
+whispered, then their voices rose again. 'The extraordinary series of
+delays is not my fault. I did my possible.' The fat man sighed, 'Very
+sad.' 'And the pestiferous absurdity of his talk,' continued the other;
+'he bothered me enough when he was here. "Each station should be like a
+beacon on the road towards better things, a center for trade of course,
+but also for humanizing, improving, instructing." Conceive you--that
+ass! And he wants to be manager! No, it's--' Here he got choked by
+excessive indignation, and I lifted my head the least bit. I was
+surprised to see how near they were--right under me. I could have spat
+upon their hats. They were looking on the ground, absorbed in thought.
+The manager was switching his leg with a slender twig: his sagacious
+relative lifted his head. 'You have been well since you came out this
+time?' he asked. The other gave a start. 'Who? I? Oh! Like a charm--like
+a charm. But the rest--oh, my goodness! All sick. They die so quick,
+too, that I haven't the time to send them out of the country--it's
+incredible!' 'H'm. Just so,' grunted the uncle. 'Ah! my boy, trust to
+this--I say, trust to this.' I saw him extend his short flipper of
+an arm for a gesture that took in the forest, the creek, the mud, the
+river,--seemed to beckon with a dishonoring flourish before the sunlit
+face of the land a treacherous appeal to the lurking death, to the
+hidden evil, to the profound darkness of its heart. It was so startling
+that I leaped to my feet and looked back at the edge of the forest, as
+though I had expected an answer of some sort to that black display of
+confidence. You know the foolish notions that come to one sometimes. The
+high stillness confronted these two figures with its ominous patience,
+waiting for the passing away of a fantastic invasion.
+
+"They swore aloud together--out of sheer fright, I believe--then
+pretending not to know anything of my existence, turned back to the
+station. The sun was low; and leaning forward side by side, they seemed
+to be tugging painfully uphill their two ridiculous shadows of unequal
+length, that trailed behind them slowly over the tall grass without
+bending a single blade.
+
+"In a few days the Eldorado Expedition went into the patient wilderness,
+that closed upon it as the sea closes over a diver. Long afterwards the
+news came that all the donkeys were dead. I know nothing as to the fate
+of the less valuable animals. They, no doubt, like the rest of us, found
+what they deserved. I did not inquire. I was then rather excited at
+the prospect of meeting Kurtz very soon. When I say very soon I mean
+it comparatively. It was just two months from the day we left the creek
+when we came to the bank below Kurtz's station.
+
+"Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings
+of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were
+kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air
+was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of
+sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into
+the gloom of overshadowed distances. On silvery sandbanks hippos and
+alligators sunned themselves side by side. The broadening waters flowed
+through a mob of wooded islands; you lost your way on that river as you
+would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to
+find the channel, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off for
+ever from everything you had known once--somewhere--far away--in another
+existence perhaps. There were moments when one's past came back to one,
+as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare to yourself;
+but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered
+with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of
+plants, and water, and silence. And this stillness of life did not in
+the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force
+brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful
+aspect. I got used to it afterwards; I did not see it any more; I had no
+time. I had to keep guessing at the channel; I had to discern, mostly by
+inspiration, the signs of hidden banks; I watched for sunken stones; I
+was learning to clap my teeth smartly before my heart flew out, when I
+shaved by a fluke some infernal sly old snag that would have ripped the
+life out of the tin-pot steamboat and drowned all the pilgrims; I had to
+keep a look-out for the signs of dead wood we could cut up in the night
+for next day's steaming. When you have to attend to things of that sort,
+to the mere incidents of the surface, the reality--the reality, I tell
+you--fades. The inner truth is hidden--luckily, luckily. But I felt it
+all the same; I felt often its mysterious stillness watching me at
+my monkey tricks, just as it watches you fellows performing on your
+respective tight-ropes for--what is it? half-a-crown a tumble--"
+
+"Try to be civil, Marlow," growled a voice, and I knew there was at
+least one listener awake besides myself.
+
+"I beg your pardon. I forgot the heartache which makes up the rest of
+the price. And indeed what does the price matter, if the trick be well
+done? You do your tricks very well. And I didn't do badly either, since
+I managed not to sink that steamboat on my first trip. It's a wonder to
+me yet. Imagine a blindfolded man set to drive a van over a bad road.
+I sweated and shivered over that business considerably, I can tell
+you. After all, for a seaman, to scrape the bottom of the thing that's
+supposed to float all the time under his care is the unpardonable sin.
+No one may know of it, but you never forget the thump--eh? A blow on the
+very heart. You remember it, you dream of it, you wake up at night and
+think of it--years after--and go hot and cold all over. I don't pretend
+to say that steamboat floated all the time. More than once she had to
+wade for a bit, with twenty cannibals splashing around and pushing.
+We had enlisted some of these chaps on the way for a crew. Fine
+fellows--cannibals--in their place. They were men one could work with,
+and I am grateful to them. And, after all, they did not eat each other
+before my face: they had brought along a provision of hippo-meat
+which went rotten, and made the mystery of the wilderness stink in my
+nostrils. Phoo! I can sniff it now. I had the manager on board and three
+or four pilgrims with their staves--all complete. Sometimes we came upon
+a station close by the bank, clinging to the skirts of the unknown, and
+the white men rushing out of a tumble-down hovel, with great gestures of
+joy and surprise and welcome, seemed very strange,--had the appearance
+of being held there captive by a spell. The word ivory would ring in
+the air for a while--and on we went again into the silence, along empty
+reaches, round the still bends, between the high walls of our
+winding way, reverberating in hollow claps the ponderous beat of the
+stern-wheel. Trees, trees, millions of trees, massive, immense, running
+up high; and at their foot, hugging the bank against the stream, crept
+the little begrimed steamboat, like a sluggish beetle crawling on the
+floor of a lofty portico. It made you feel very small, very lost, and
+yet it was not altogether depressing, that feeling. After all, if you
+were small, the grimy beetle crawled on--which was just what you wanted
+it to do. Where the pilgrims imagined it crawled to I don't know.
+To some place where they expected to get something, I bet! For me it
+crawled toward Kurtz--exclusively; but when the steam-pipes started
+leaking we crawled very slow. The reaches opened before us and closed
+behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar
+the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart
+of darkness. It was very quiet there. At night sometimes the roll of
+drums behind the curtain of trees would run up the river and remain
+sustained faintly, as if hovering in the air high over our heads, till
+the first break of day. Whether it meant war, peace, or prayer we could
+not tell. The dawns were heralded by the descent of a chill stillness;
+the woodcutters slept, their fires burned low; the snapping of a twig
+would make you start. We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an
+earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied
+ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance,
+to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil. But
+suddenly, as we struggled round a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush
+walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs,
+a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes
+rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage. The steamer
+toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy.
+The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us--who
+could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings;
+we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane
+men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not
+understand, because we were too far and could not remember, because we
+were traveling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone,
+leaving hardly a sign--and no memories.
+
+"The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled
+form of a conquered monster, but there--there you could look at a thing
+monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were--No, they were
+not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it--this suspicion of
+their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled, and
+leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just
+the thought of their humanity--like yours--the thought of your remote
+kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly
+enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that
+there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible
+frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it
+which you--you so remote from the night of first ages--could comprehend.
+And why not? The mind of man is capable of anything--because everything
+is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after
+all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valor, rage--who can tell?--but
+truth--truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and
+shudder--the man knows, and can look on without a wink. But he must at
+least be as much of a man as these on the shore. He must meet that
+truth with his own true stuff--with his own inborn strength. Principles?
+Principles won't do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags--rags that would
+fly off at the first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief. An
+appeal to me in this fiendish row--is there? Very well; I hear; I admit,
+but I have a voice too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that
+cannot be silenced. Of course, a fool, what with sheer fright and fine
+sentiments, is always safe. Who's that grunting? You wonder I didn't go
+ashore for a howl and a dance? Well, no--I didn't. Fine sentiments, you
+say? Fine sentiments, be hanged! I had no time. I had to mess about with
+white-lead and strips of woolen blanket helping to put bandages on
+those leaky steam-pipes--I tell you. I had to watch the steering, and
+circumvent those snags, and get the tin-pot along by hook or by crook.
+There was surface-truth enough in these things to save a wiser man. And
+between whiles I had to look after the savage who was fireman. He was
+an improved specimen; he could fire up a vertical boiler. He was there
+below me, and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a
+dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat, walking on his hind-legs.
+A few months of training had done for that really fine chap. He squinted
+at the steam-gauge and at the water-gauge with an evident effort of
+intrepidity--and he had filed teeth too, the poor devil, and the wool of
+his pate shaved into queer patterns, and three ornamental scars on each
+of his cheeks. He ought to have been clapping his hands and stamping
+his feet on the bank, instead of which he was hard at work, a thrall to
+strange witchcraft, full of improving knowledge. He was useful because
+he had been instructed; and what he knew was this--that should the water
+in that transparent thing disappear, the evil spirit inside the boiler
+would get angry through the greatness of his thirst, and take a terrible
+vengeance. So he sweated and fired up and watched the glass fearfully
+(with an impromptu charm, made of rags, tied to his arm, and a piece of
+polished bone, as big as a watch, stuck flatways through his lower lip),
+while the wooded banks slipped past us slowly, the short noise was left
+behind, the interminable miles of silence--and we crept on, towards
+Kurtz. But the snags were thick, the water was treacherous and shallow,
+the boiler seemed indeed to have a sulky devil in it, and thus neither
+that fireman nor I had any time to peer into our creepy thoughts.
+
+"Some fifty miles below the Inner Station we came upon a hut of reeds,
+an inclined and melancholy pole, with the unrecognizable tatters of
+what had been a flag of some sort flying from it, and a neatly stacked
+woodpile. This was unexpected. We came to the bank, and on the stack of
+firewood found a flat piece of board with some faded pencil-writing
+on it. When deciphered it said: 'Wood for you. Hurry up. Approach
+cautiously.' There was a signature, but it was illegible--not
+Kurtz--a much longer word. 'Hurry up.' Where? Up the river? 'Approach
+cautiously.' We had not done so. But the warning could not have been
+meant for the place where it could be only found after approach.
+Something was wrong above. But what--and how much? That was the
+question. We commented adversely upon the imbecility of that telegraphic
+style. The bush around said nothing, and would not let us look very far,
+either. A torn curtain of red twill hung in the doorway of the hut, and
+flapped sadly in our faces. The dwelling was dismantled; but we could
+see a white man had lived there not very long ago. There remained a rude
+table--a plank on two posts; a heap of rubbish reposed in a dark corner,
+and by the door I picked up a book. It had lost its covers, and the
+pages had been thumbed into a state of extremely dirty softness; but the
+back had been lovingly stitched afresh with white cotton thread, which
+looked clean yet. It was an extraordinary find. Its title was, 'An
+Inquiry into some Points of Seamanship,' by a man Tower, Towson--some
+such name--Master in his Majesty's Navy. The matter looked dreary
+reading enough, with illustrative diagrams and repulsive tables of
+figures, and the copy was sixty years old. I handled this amazing
+antiquity with the greatest possible tenderness, lest it should dissolve
+in my hands. Within, Towson or Towser was inquiring earnestly into the
+breaking strain of ships' chains and tackle, and other such matters. Not
+a very enthralling book; but at the first glance you could see there a
+singleness of intention, an honest concern for the right way of going
+to work, which made these humble pages, thought out so many years ago,
+luminous with another than a professional light. The simple old sailor,
+with his talk of chains and purchases, made me forget the jungle and
+the pilgrims in a delicious sensation of having come upon something
+unmistakably real. Such a book being there was wonderful enough; but
+still more astounding were the notes penciled in the margin, and plainly
+referring to the text. I couldn't believe my eyes! They were in cipher!
+Yes, it looked like cipher. Fancy a man lugging with him a book of that
+description into this nowhere and studying it--and making notes--in
+cipher at that! It was an extravagant mystery.
+
+"I had been dimly aware for some time of a worrying noise, and when I
+lifted my eyes I saw the wood-pile was gone, and the manager, aided by
+all the pilgrims, was shouting at me from the river-side. I slipped the
+book into my pocket. I assure you to leave off reading was like tearing
+myself away from the shelter of an old and solid friendship.
+
+"I started the lame engine ahead. 'It must be this miserable
+trader--this intruder,' exclaimed the manager, looking back malevolently
+at the place we had left. 'He must be English,' I said. 'It will not
+save him from getting into trouble if he is not careful,' muttered the
+manager darkly. I observed with assumed innocence that no man was safe
+from trouble in this world.
+
+"The current was more rapid now, the steamer seemed at her last gasp,
+the stern-wheel flopped languidly, and I caught myself listening on
+tiptoe for the next beat of the boat, for in sober truth I expected the
+wretched thing to give up every moment. It was like watching the last
+flickers of a life. But still we crawled. Sometimes I would pick out a
+tree a little way ahead to measure our progress towards Kurtz by, but
+I lost it invariably before we got abreast. To keep the eyes so long
+on one thing was too much for human patience. The manager displayed
+a beautiful resignation. I fretted and fumed and took to arguing with
+myself whether or no I would talk openly with Kurtz; but before I could
+come to any conclusion it occurred to me that my speech or my silence,
+indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility. What did it matter
+what anyone knew or ignored? What did it matter who was manager? One
+gets sometimes such a flash of insight. The essentials of this affair
+lay deep under the surface, beyond my reach, and beyond my power of
+meddling.
+
+"Towards the evening of the second day we judged ourselves about eight
+miles from Kurtz's station. I wanted to push on; but the manager looked
+grave, and told me the navigation up there was so dangerous that it
+would be advisable, the sun being very low already, to wait where we
+were till next morning. Moreover, he pointed out that if the warning
+to approach cautiously were to be followed, we must approach in
+daylight--not at dusk, or in the dark. This was sensible enough. Eight
+miles meant nearly three hours' steaming for us, and I could also see
+suspicious ripples at the upper end of the reach. Nevertheless, I was
+annoyed beyond expression at the delay, and most unreasonably too, since
+one night more could not matter much after so many months. As we had
+plenty of wood, and caution was the word, I brought up in the middle
+of the stream. The reach was narrow, straight, with high sides like a
+railway cutting. The dusk came gliding into it long before the sun had
+set. The current ran smooth and swift, but a dumb immobility sat on
+the banks. The living trees, lashed together by the creepers and every
+living bush of the undergrowth, might have been changed into stone,
+even to the slenderest twig, to the lightest leaf. It was not sleep--it
+seemed unnatural, like a state of trance. Not the faintest sound of any
+kind could be heard. You looked on amazed, and began to suspect yourself
+of being deaf--then the night came suddenly, and struck you blind as
+well. About three in the morning some large fish leaped, and the loud
+splash made me jump as though a gun had been fired. When the sun rose
+there was a white fog, very warm and clammy, and more blinding than the
+night. It did not shift or drive; it was just there, standing all round
+you like something solid. At eight or nine, perhaps, it lifted as a
+shutter lifts. We had a glimpse of the towering multitude of trees,
+of the immense matted jungle, with the blazing little ball of the sun
+hanging over it--all perfectly still--and then the white shutter came
+down again, smoothly, as if sliding in greased grooves. I ordered the
+chain, which we had begun to heave in, to be paid out again. Before it
+stopped running with a muffled rattle, a cry, a very loud cry, as of
+infinite desolation, soared slowly in the opaque air. It ceased. A
+complaining clamor, modulated in savage discords, filled our ears. The
+sheer unexpectedness of it made my hair stir under my cap. I don't know
+how it struck the others: to me it seemed as though the mist itself had
+screamed, so suddenly, and apparently from all sides at once, did
+this tumultuous and mournful uproar arise. It culminated in a hurried
+outbreak of almost intolerably excessive shrieking, which stopped short,
+leaving us stiffened in a variety of silly attitudes, and obstinately
+listening to the nearly as appalling and excessive silence. 'Good God!
+What is the meaning--?' stammered at my elbow one of the pilgrims,--a
+little fat man, with sandy hair and red whiskers, who wore side-spring
+boots, and pink pyjamas tucked into his socks. Two others remained
+open-mouthed a whole minute, then dashed into the little cabin, to rush
+out incontinently and stand darting scared glances, with Winchesters at
+'ready' in their hands. What we could see was just the steamer we
+were on, her outlines blurred as though she had been on the point of
+dissolving, and a misty strip of water, perhaps two feet broad, around
+her--and that was all. The rest of the world was nowhere, as far as our
+eyes and ears were concerned. Just nowhere. Gone, disappeared; swept off
+without leaving a whisper or a shadow behind.
+
+"I went forward, and ordered the chain to be hauled in short, so as to
+be ready to trip the anchor and move the steamboat at once if necessary.
+'Will they attack?' whispered an awed voice. 'We will all be butchered
+in this fog,' murmured another. The faces twitched with the strain, the
+hands trembled slightly, the eyes forgot to wink. It was very curious
+to see the contrast of expressions of the white men and of the black
+fellows of our crew, who were as much strangers to that part of the
+river as we, though their homes were only eight hundred miles away. The
+whites, of course greatly discomposed, had besides a curious look of
+being painfully shocked by such an outrageous row. The others had an
+alert, naturally interested expression; but their faces were essentially
+quiet, even those of the one or two who grinned as they hauled at the
+chain. Several exchanged short, grunting phrases, which seemed to settle
+the matter to their satisfaction. Their headman, a young, broad-chested
+black, severely draped in dark-blue fringed cloths, with fierce nostrils
+and his hair all done up artfully in oily ringlets, stood near me.
+'Aha!' I said, just for good fellowship's sake. 'Catch 'im,' he snapped,
+with a bloodshot widening of his eyes and a flash of sharp teeth--'catch
+'im. Give 'im to us.' 'To you, eh?' I asked; 'what would you do with
+them?' 'Eat 'im!' he said curtly, and, leaning his elbow on the rail,
+looked out into the fog in a dignified and profoundly pensive attitude.
+I would no doubt have been properly horrified, had it not occurred to
+me that he and his chaps must be very hungry: that they must have been
+growing increasingly hungry for at least this month past. They had been
+engaged for six months (I don't think a single one of them had any
+clear idea of time, as we at the end of countless ages have. They still
+belonged to the beginnings of time--had no inherited experience to teach
+them as it were), and of course, as long as there was a piece of paper
+written over in accordance with some farcical law or other made down the
+river, it didn't enter anybody's head to trouble how they would live.
+Certainly they had brought with them some rotten hippo-meat, which
+couldn't have lasted very long, anyway, even if the pilgrims hadn't, in
+the midst of a shocking hullabaloo, thrown a considerable quantity of it
+overboard. It looked like a high-handed proceeding; but it was really
+a case of legitimate self-defense. You can't breathe dead hippo waking,
+sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on
+existence. Besides that, they had given them every week three pieces of
+brass wire, each about nine inches long; and the theory was they were to
+buy their provisions with that currency in river-side villages. You can
+see how _that_ worked. There were either no villages, or the people were
+hostile, or the director, who like the rest of us fed out of tins, with
+an occasional old he-goat thrown in, didn't want to stop the steamer for
+some more or less recondite reason. So, unless they swallowed the wire
+itself, or made loops of it to snare the fishes with, I don't see what
+good their extravagant salary could be to them. I must say it was paid
+with a regularity worthy of a large and honorable trading company. For
+the rest, the only thing to eat--though it didn't look eatable in the
+least--I saw in their possession was a few lumps of some stuff like
+half-cooked dough, of a dirty lavender color, they kept wrapped in
+leaves, and now and then swallowed a piece of, but so small that it
+seemed done more for the looks of the thing than for any serious purpose
+of sustenance. Why in the name of all the gnawing devils of hunger they
+didn't go for us--they were thirty to five--and have a good tuck in for
+once, amazes me now when I think of it. They were big powerful men,
+with not much capacity to weigh the consequences, with courage, with
+strength, even yet, though their skins were no longer glossy and their
+muscles no longer hard. And I saw that something restraining, one of
+those human secrets that baffle probability, had come into play there.
+I looked at them with a swift quickening of interest--not because it
+occurred to me I might be eaten by them before very long, though I
+own to you that just then I perceived--in a new light, as it were--how
+unwholesome the pilgrims looked, and I hoped, yes, I positively hoped,
+that my aspect was not so--what shall I say?--so--unappetizing: a touch
+of fantastic vanity which fitted well with the dream-sensation that
+pervaded all my days at that time. Perhaps I had a little fever too. One
+can't live with one's finger everlastingly on one's pulse. I had
+often 'a little fever,' or a little touch of other things--the playful
+paw-strokes of the wilderness, the preliminary trifling before the more
+serious onslaught which came in due course. Yes; I looked at them as you
+would on any human being, with a curiosity of their impulses, motives,
+capacities, weaknesses, when brought to the test of an inexorable
+physical necessity. Restraint! What possible restraint? Was it
+superstition, disgust, patience, fear--or some kind of primitive honor?
+No fear can stand up to hunger, no patience can wear it out, disgust
+simply does not exist where hunger is; and as to superstition, beliefs,
+and what you may call principles, they are less than chaff in a breeze.
+Don't you know the devilry of lingering starvation, its exasperating
+torment, its black thoughts, its somber and brooding ferocity? Well,
+I do. It takes a man all his inborn strength to fight hunger properly.
+It's really easier to face bereavement, dishonor, and the perdition of
+one's soul--than this kind of prolonged hunger. Sad, but true. And these
+chaps too had no earthly reason for any kind of scruple. Restraint! I
+would just as soon have expected restraint from a hyena prowling amongst
+the corpses of a battlefield. But there was the fact facing me--the fact
+dazzling, to be seen, like the foam on the depths of the sea, like a
+ripple on an unfathomable enigma, a mystery greater--when I thought
+of it--than the curious, inexplicable note of desperate grief in this
+savage clamor that had swept by us on the river-bank, behind the blind
+whiteness of the fog.
+
+"Two pilgrims were quarreling in hurried whispers as to which bank.
+'Left.' 'No, no; how can you? Right, right, of course.' 'It is very
+serious,' said the manager's voice behind me; 'I would be desolated if
+anything should happen to Mr. Kurtz before we came up.' I looked at him,
+and had not the slightest doubt he was sincere. He was just the kind of
+man who would wish to preserve appearances. That was his restraint. But
+when he muttered something about going on at once, I did not even take
+the trouble to answer him. I knew, and he knew, that it was impossible.
+Were we to let go our hold of the bottom, we would be absolutely in
+the air--in space. We wouldn't be able to tell where we were going
+to--whether up or down stream, or across--till we fetched against one
+bank or the other,--and then we wouldn't know at first which it was.
+Of course I made no move. I had no mind for a smash-up. You couldn't
+imagine a more deadly place for a shipwreck. Whether drowned at once or
+not, we were sure to perish speedily in one way or another. 'I authorize
+you to take all the risks,' he said, after a short silence. 'I refuse to
+take any,' I said shortly; which was just the answer he expected, though
+its tone might have surprised him. 'Well, I must defer to your judgment.
+You are captain,' he said, with marked civility. I turned my shoulder to
+him in sign of my appreciation, and looked into the fog. How long would
+it last? It was the most hopeless look-out. The approach to this Kurtz
+grubbing for ivory in the wretched bush was beset by as many dangers as
+though he had been an enchanted princess sleeping in a fabulous castle.
+'Will they attack, do you think?' asked the manager, in a confidential
+tone.
+
+"I did not think they would attack, for several obvious reasons. The
+thick fog was one. If they left the bank in their canoes they would get
+lost in it, as we would be if we attempted to move. Still, I had also
+judged the jungle of both banks quite impenetrable--and yet eyes were
+in it, eyes that had seen us. The river-side bushes were certainly very
+thick; but the undergrowth behind was evidently penetrable.
+However, during the short lift I had seen no canoes anywhere in the
+reach--certainly not abreast of the steamer. But what made the idea of
+attack inconceivable to me was the nature of the noise--of the cries we
+had heard. They had not the fierce character boding of immediate hostile
+intention. Unexpected, wild, and violent as they had been, they had
+given me an irresistible impression of sorrow. The glimpse of the
+steamboat had for some reason filled those savages with unrestrained
+grief. The danger, if any, I expounded, was from our proximity to a
+great human passion let loose. Even extreme grief may ultimately vent
+itself in violence--but more generally takes the form of apathy. . . .
+
+"You should have seen the pilgrims stare! They had no heart to grin, or
+even to revile me; but I believe they thought me gone mad--with fright,
+maybe. I delivered a regular lecture. My dear boys, it was no good
+bothering. Keep a look-out? Well, you may guess I watched the fog for
+the signs of lifting as a cat watches a mouse; but for anything else our
+eyes were of no more use to us than if we had been buried miles deep
+in a heap of cotton-wool. It felt like it too--choking, warm, stifling.
+Besides, all I said, though it sounded extravagant, was absolutely
+true to fact. What we afterwards alluded to as an attack was really an
+attempt at repulse. The action was very far from being aggressive--it
+was not even defensive, in the usual sense: it was undertaken under the
+stress of desperation, and in its essence was purely protective.
+
+"It developed itself, I should say, two hours after the fog lifted, and
+its commencement was at a spot, roughly speaking, about a mile and a
+half below Kurtz's station. We had just floundered and flopped round a
+bend, when I saw an islet, a mere grassy hummock of bright green, in
+the middle of the stream. It was the only thing of the kind; but as we
+opened the reach more, I perceived it was the head of a long sandbank,
+or rather of a chain of shallow patches stretching down the middle of
+the river. They were discolored, just awash, and the whole lot was seen
+just under the water, exactly as a man's backbone is seen running down
+the middle of his back under the skin. Now, as far as I did see, I could
+go to the right or to the left of this. I didn't know either channel, of
+course. The banks looked pretty well alike, the depth appeared the same;
+but as I had been informed the station was on the west side, I naturally
+headed for the western passage.
+
+"No sooner had we fairly entered it than I became aware it was much
+narrower than I had supposed. To the left of us there was the long
+uninterrupted shoal, and to the right a high, steep bank heavily
+overgrown with bushes. Above the bush the trees stood in serried ranks.
+The twigs overhung the current thickly, and from distance to distance a
+large limb of some tree projected rigidly over the stream. It was then
+well on in the afternoon, the face of the forest was gloomy, and a
+broad strip of shadow had already fallen on the water. In this shadow
+we steamed up--very slowly, as you may imagine. I sheered her well
+inshore--the water being deepest near the bank, as the sounding-pole
+informed me.
+
+"One of my hungry and forbearing friends was sounding in the bows just
+below me. This steamboat was exactly like a decked scow. On the deck
+there were two little teak-wood houses, with doors and windows. The
+boiler was in the fore-end, and the machinery right astern. Over the
+whole there was a light roof, supported on stanchions. The funnel
+projected through that roof, and in front of the funnel a small cabin
+built of light planks served for a pilot-house. It contained a couch,
+two camp-stools, a loaded Martini-Henry leaning in one corner, a tiny
+table, and the steering-wheel. It had a wide door in front and a broad
+shutter at each side. All these were always thrown open, of course. I
+spent my days perched up there on the extreme fore-end of that roof,
+before the door. At night I slept, or tried to, on the couch. An
+athletic black belonging to some coast tribe, and educated by my poor
+predecessor, was the helmsman. He sported a pair of brass earrings, wore
+a blue cloth wrapper from the waist to the ankles, and thought all the
+world of himself. He was the most unstable kind of fool I had ever seen.
+He steered with no end of a swagger while you were by; but if he lost
+sight of you, he became instantly the prey of an abject funk, and would
+let that cripple of a steamboat get the upper hand of him in a minute.
+
+"I was looking down at the sounding-pole, and feeling much annoyed to
+see at each try a little more of it stick out of that river, when I saw
+my poleman give up the business suddenly, and stretch himself flat on
+the deck, without even taking the trouble to haul his pole in. He kept
+hold on it though, and it trailed in the water. At the same time the
+fireman, whom I could also see below me, sat down abruptly before his
+furnace and ducked his head. I was amazed. Then I had to look at the
+river mighty quick, because there was a snag in the fairway. Sticks,
+little sticks, were flying about--thick: they were whizzing before my
+nose, dropping below me, striking behind me against my pilot-house. All
+this time the river, the shore, the woods, were very quiet--perfectly
+quiet. I could only hear the heavy splashing thump of the stern-wheel
+and the patter of these things. We cleared the snag clumsily. Arrows, by
+Jove! We were being shot at! I stepped in quickly to close the shutter
+on the land side. That fool-helmsman, his hands on the spokes, was
+lifting his knees high, stamping his feet, champing his mouth, like a
+reined-in horse. Confound him! And we were staggering within ten feet of
+the bank. I had to lean right out to swing the heavy shutter, and I saw
+a face amongst the leaves on the level with my own, looking at me very
+fierce and steady; and then suddenly, as though a veil had been removed
+from my eyes, I made out, deep in the tangled gloom, naked breasts,
+arms, legs, glaring eyes,--the bush was swarming with human limbs in
+movement, glistening, of bronze color. The twigs shook, swayed, and
+rustled, the arrows flew out of them, and then the shutter came to.
+'Steer her straight,' I said to the helmsman. He held his head rigid,
+face forward; but his eyes rolled, he kept on lifting and setting down
+his feet gently, his mouth foamed a little. 'Keep quiet!' I said in a
+fury. I might just as well have ordered a tree not to sway in the wind.
+I darted out. Below me there was a great scuffle of feet on the iron
+deck; confused exclamations; a voice screamed, 'Can you turn back?'
+I caught shape of a V-shaped ripple on the water ahead. What? Another
+snag! A fusillade burst out under my feet. The pilgrims had opened with
+their Winchesters, and were simply squirting lead into that bush. A
+deuce of a lot of smoke came up and drove slowly forward. I swore at
+it. Now I couldn't see the ripple or the snag either. I stood in the
+doorway, peering, and the arrows came in swarms. They might have been
+poisoned, but they looked as though they wouldn't kill a cat. The bush
+began to howl. Our wood-cutters raised a warlike whoop; the report of a
+rifle just at my back deafened me. I glanced over my shoulder, and the
+pilot-house was yet full of noise and smoke when I made a dash at the
+wheel. The fool-nigger had dropped everything, to throw the shutter
+open and let off that Martini-Henry. He stood before the wide opening,
+glaring, and I yelled at him to come back, while I straightened the
+sudden twist out of that steamboat. There was no room to turn even if I
+had wanted to, the snag was somewhere very near ahead in that confounded
+smoke, there was no time to lose, so I just crowded her into the
+bank--right into the bank, where I knew the water was deep.
+
+"We tore slowly along the overhanging bushes in a whirl of broken twigs
+and flying leaves. The fusillade below stopped short, as I had foreseen
+it would when the squirts got empty. I threw my head back to a glinting
+whizz that traversed the pilot-house, in at one shutter-hole and out
+at the other. Looking past that mad helmsman, who was shaking the empty
+rifle and yelling at the shore, I saw vague forms of men running bent
+double, leaping, gliding, distinct, incomplete, evanescent. Something
+big appeared in the air before the shutter, the rifle went overboard,
+and the man stepped back swiftly, looked at me over his shoulder in an
+extraordinary, profound, familiar manner, and fell upon my feet. The
+side of his head hit the wheel twice, and the end of what appeared
+a long cane clattered round and knocked over a little camp-stool. It
+looked as though after wrenching that thing from somebody ashore he had
+lost his balance in the effort. The thin smoke had blown away, we were
+clear of the snag, and looking ahead I could see that in another hundred
+yards or so I would be free to sheer off, away from the bank; but my
+feet felt so very warm and wet that I had to look down. The man had
+rolled on his back and stared straight up at me; both his hands clutched
+that cane. It was the shaft of a spear that, either thrown or lunged
+through the opening, had caught him in the side just below the ribs; the
+blade had gone in out of sight, after making a frightful gash; my shoes
+were full; a pool of blood lay very still, gleaming dark-red under the
+wheel; his eyes shone with an amazing luster. The fusillade burst out
+again. He looked at me anxiously, gripping the spear like something
+precious, with an air of being afraid I would try to take it away from
+him. I had to make an effort to free my eyes from his gaze and attend
+to the steering. With one hand I felt above my head for the line of
+the steam-whistle, and jerked out screech after screech hurriedly. The
+tumult of angry and warlike yells was checked instantly, and then from
+the depths of the woods went out such a tremulous and prolonged wail of
+mournful fear and utter despair as may be imagined to follow the flight
+of the last hope from the earth. There was a great commotion in the
+bush; the shower of arrows stopped, a few dropping shots rang out
+sharply--then silence, in which the languid beat of the stern-wheel came
+plainly to my ears. I put the helm hard a-starboard at the moment when
+the pilgrim in pink pyjamas, very hot and agitated, appeared in the
+doorway. 'The manager sends me--' he began in an official tone, and
+stopped short. 'Good God!' he said, glaring at the wounded man.
+
+"We two whites stood over him, and his lustrous and inquiring glance
+enveloped us both. I declare it looked as though he would presently put
+to us some question in an understandable language; but he died without
+uttering a sound, without moving a limb, without twitching a muscle.
+Only in the very last moment, as though in response to some sign we
+could not see, to some whisper we could not hear, he frowned heavily,
+and that frown gave to his black death-mask an inconceivably somber,
+brooding, and menacing expression. The luster of inquiring glance faded
+swiftly into vacant glassiness. 'Can you steer?' I asked the agent
+eagerly. He looked very dubious; but I made a grab at his arm, and he
+understood at once I meant him to steer whether or no. To tell you
+the truth, I was morbidly anxious to change my shoes and socks. 'He is
+dead,' murmured the fellow, immensely impressed. 'No doubt about it,'
+said I, tugging like mad at the shoe-laces. 'And, by the way, I suppose
+Mr. Kurtz is dead as well by this time.'
+
+"For the moment that was the dominant thought. There was a sense of
+extreme disappointment, as though I had found out I had been striving
+after something altogether without a substance. I couldn't have been
+more disgusted if I had traveled all this way for the sole purpose of
+talking with Mr. Kurtz. Talking with. . . . I flung one shoe overboard,
+and became aware that that was exactly what I had been looking forward
+to--a talk with Kurtz. I made the strange discovery that I had never
+imagined him as doing, you know, but as discoursing. I didn't say to
+myself, 'Now I will never see him,' or 'Now I will never shake him by
+the hand,' but, 'Now I will never hear him.' The man presented himself
+as a voice. Not of course that I did not connect him with some sort of
+action. Hadn't I been told in all the tones of jealousy and admiration
+that he had collected, bartered, swindled, or stolen more ivory than all
+the other agents together? That was not the point. The point was in his
+being a gifted creature, and that of all his gifts the one that stood
+out pre-eminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence, was
+his ability to talk, his words--the gift of expression, the bewildering,
+the illuminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the
+pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an
+impenetrable darkness.
+
+"The other shoe went flying unto the devil-god of that river. I thought,
+'By Jove! it's all over. We are too late; he has vanished--the gift has
+vanished, by means of some spear, arrow, or club. I will never hear that
+chap speak after all,'--and my sorrow had a startling extravagance
+of emotion, even such as I had noticed in the howling sorrow of these
+savages in the bush. I couldn't have felt more of lonely desolation
+somehow, had I been robbed of a belief or had missed my destiny in
+life. . . . Why do you sigh in this beastly way, somebody? Absurd? Well,
+absurd. Good Lord! mustn't a man ever--Here, give me some tobacco." . . .
+
+There was a pause of profound stillness, then a match flared, and
+Marlow's lean face appeared, worn, hollow, with downward folds and
+dropped eyelids, with an aspect of concentrated attention; and as he
+took vigorous draws at his pipe, it seemed to retreat and advance out of
+the night in the regular flicker of the tiny flame. The match went out.
+
+"Absurd!" he cried. "This is the worst of trying to tell. . . . Here
+you all are, each moored with two good addresses, like a hulk with
+two anchors, a butcher round one corner, a policeman round another,
+excellent appetites, and temperature normal--you hear--normal from
+year's end to year's end. And you say, Absurd! Absurd be--exploded!
+Absurd! My dear boys, what can you expect from a man who out of sheer
+nervousness had just flung overboard a pair of new shoes. Now I think of
+it, it is amazing I did not shed tears. I am, upon the whole, proud
+of my fortitude. I was cut to the quick at the idea of having lost the
+inestimable privilege of listening to the gifted Kurtz. Of course I
+was wrong. The privilege was waiting for me. Oh yes, I heard more than
+enough. And I was right, too. A voice. He was very little more than a
+voice. And I heard--him--it--this voice--other voices--all of them were
+so little more than voices--and the memory of that time itself lingers
+around me, impalpable, like a dying vibration of one immense jabber,
+silly, atrocious, sordid, savage, or simply mean, without any kind of
+sense. Voices, voices--even the girl herself--now--"
+
+He was silent for a long time.
+
+"I laid the ghost of his gifts at last with a lie," he began suddenly.
+"Girl! What? Did I mention a girl? Oh, she is out of it--completely.
+They--the women, I mean--are out of it--should be out of it. We must
+help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own, lest ours
+gets worse. Oh, she had to be out of it. You should have heard the
+disinterred body of Mr. Kurtz saying, 'My Intended.' You would have
+perceived directly then how completely she was out of it. And the lofty
+frontal bone of Mr. Kurtz! They say the hair goes on growing sometimes,
+but this--ah specimen, was impressively bald. The wilderness had patted
+him on the head, and, behold, it was like a ball--an ivory ball; it had
+caressed him, and--lo!--he had withered; it had taken him, loved him,
+embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed
+his soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish
+initiation. He was its spoiled and pampered favorite. Ivory? I should
+think so. Heaps of it, stacks of it. The old mud shanty was bursting
+with it. You would think there was not a single tusk left either above
+or below the ground in the whole country. 'Mostly fossil,' the manager
+had remarked disparagingly. It was no more fossil than I am; but they
+call it fossil when it is dug up. It appears these niggers do bury
+the tusks sometimes--but evidently they couldn't bury this parcel
+deep enough to save the gifted Mr. Kurtz from his fate. We filled the
+steamboat with it, and had to pile a lot on the deck. Thus he could
+see and enjoy as long as he could see, because the appreciation of this
+favor had remained with him to the last. You should have heard him say,
+'My ivory.' Oh yes, I heard him. 'My Intended, my ivory, my station, my
+river, my--' everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in
+expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into a prodigious peal of
+laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places. Everything
+belonged to him--but that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he
+belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own. That
+was the reflection that made you creepy all over. It was impossible--it
+was not good for one either--trying to imagine. He had taken a high seat
+amongst the devils of the land--I mean literally. You can't understand.
+How could you?--with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind
+neighbors ready to cheer you or to fall on you, stepping delicately
+between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and
+gallows and lunatic asylums--how can you imagine what particular region
+of the first ages a man's untrammeled feet may take him into by the way
+of solitude--utter solitude without a policeman--by the way of silence,
+utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbor can be heard
+whispering of public opinion? These little things make all the great
+difference. When they are gone you must fall back upon your own innate
+strength, upon your own capacity for faithfulness. Of course you may
+be too much of a fool to go wrong--too dull even to know you are being
+assaulted by the powers of darkness. I take it, no fool ever made a
+bargain for his soul with the devil: the fool is too much of a fool, or
+the devil too much of a devil--I don't know which. Or you may be such
+a thunderingly exalted creature as to be altogether deaf and blind to
+anything but heavenly sights and sounds. Then the earth for you is only
+a standing place--and whether to be like this is your loss or your gain
+I won't pretend to say. But most of us are neither one nor the other.
+The earth for us is a place to live in, where we must put up with
+sights, with sounds, with smells too, by Jove!--breathe dead hippo,
+so to speak, and not be contaminated. And there, don't you see?
+Your strength comes in, the faith in your ability for the digging of
+unostentatious holes to bury the stuff in--your power of devotion,
+not to yourself, but to an obscure, back-breaking business. And that's
+difficult enough. Mind, I am not trying to excuse or even explain--I am
+trying to account to myself for--for--Mr. Kurtz--for the shade of Mr.
+Kurtz. This initiated wraith from the back of Nowhere honored me with
+its amazing confidence before it vanished altogether. This was because
+it could speak English to me. The original Kurtz had been educated
+partly in England, and--as he was good enough to say himself--his
+sympathies were in the right place. His mother was half-English, his
+father was half-French. All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz;
+and by-and-by I learned that, most appropriately, the International
+Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs had intrusted him with the
+making of a report, for its future guidance. And he had written it too.
+I've seen it. I've read it. It was eloquent, vibrating with eloquence,
+but too high-strung, I think. Seventeen pages of close writing he had
+found time for! But this must have been before his--let us say--nerves,
+went wrong, and caused him to preside at certain midnight dances ending
+with unspeakable rites, which--as far as I reluctantly gathered
+from what I heard at various times--were offered up to him--do you
+understand?--to Mr. Kurtz himself. But it was a beautiful piece
+of writing. The opening paragraph, however, in the light of later
+information, strikes me now as ominous. He began with the argument
+that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, 'must
+necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural
+beings--we approach them with the might as of a deity,' and so on, and
+so on. 'By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good
+practically unbounded,' &c., &c. From that point he soared and took me
+with him. The peroration was magnificent, though difficult to remember,
+you know. It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an
+august Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm. This was the
+unbounded power of eloquence--of words--of burning noble words. There
+were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases,
+unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently
+much later, in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as the exposition of
+a method. It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to
+every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying,
+like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: 'Exterminate all the brutes!'
+The curious part was that he had apparently forgotten all about that
+valuable postscriptum, because, later on, when he in a sense came to
+himself, he repeatedly entreated me to take good care of 'my pamphlet'
+(he called it), as it was sure to have in the future a good influence
+upon his career. I had full information about all these things, and,
+besides, as it turned out, I was to have the care of his memory. I've
+done enough for it to give me the indisputable right to lay it, if I
+choose, for an everlasting rest in the dust-bin of progress, amongst
+all the sweepings and, figuratively speaking, all the dead cats of
+civilization. But then, you see, I can't choose. He won't be forgotten.
+Whatever he was, he was not common. He had the power to charm or
+frighten rudimentary souls into an aggravated witch-dance in his
+honor; he could also fill the small souls of the pilgrims with bitter
+misgivings: he had one devoted friend at least, and he had conquered
+one soul in the world that was neither rudimentary nor tainted with
+self-seeking. No; I can't forget him, though I am not prepared to affirm
+the fellow was exactly worth the life we lost in getting to him. I
+missed my late helmsman awfully,--I missed him even while his body
+was still lying in the pilot-house. Perhaps you will think it passing
+strange this regret for a savage who was no more account than a grain of
+sand in a black Sahara. Well, don't you see, he had done something, he
+had steered; for months I had him at my back--a help--an instrument. It
+was a kind of partnership. He steered for me--I had to look after him, I
+worried about his deficiencies, and thus a subtle bond had been created,
+of which I only became aware when it was suddenly broken. And the
+intimate profundity of that look he gave me when he received his hurt
+remains to this day in my memory--like a claim of distant kinship
+affirmed in a supreme moment.
+
+"Poor fool! If he had only left that shutter alone. He had no restraint,
+no restraint--just like Kurtz--a tree swayed by the wind. As soon as
+I had put on a dry pair of slippers, I dragged him out, after first
+jerking the spear out of his side, which operation I confess I performed
+with my eyes shut tight. His heels leaped together over the little
+door-step; his shoulders were pressed to my breast; I hugged him from
+behind desperately. Oh! he was heavy, heavy; heavier than any man on
+earth, I should imagine. Then without more ado I tipped him overboard.
+The current snatched him as though he had been a wisp of grass, and I
+saw the body roll over twice before I lost sight of it for ever. All the
+pilgrims and the manager were then congregated on the awning-deck
+about the pilot-house, chattering at each other like a flock of excited
+magpies, and there was a scandalized murmur at my heartless promptitude.
+What they wanted to keep that body hanging about for I can't guess.
+Embalm it, maybe. But I had also heard another, and a very ominous,
+murmur on the deck below. My friends the wood-cutters were likewise
+scandalized, and with a better show of reason--though I admit that the
+reason itself was quite inadmissible. Oh, quite! I had made up my mind
+that if my late helmsman was to be eaten, the fishes alone should have
+him. He had been a very second-rate helmsman while alive, but now he was
+dead he might have become a first-class temptation, and possibly cause
+some startling trouble. Besides, I was anxious to take the wheel, the
+man in pink pyjamas showing himself a hopeless duffer at the business.
+
+"This I did directly the simple funeral was over. We were going
+half-speed, keeping right in the middle of the stream, and I listened
+to the talk about me. They had given up Kurtz, they had given up the
+station; Kurtz was dead, and the station had been burnt--and so on--and
+so on. The red-haired pilgrim was beside himself with the thought that
+at least this poor Kurtz had been properly revenged. 'Say! We must have
+made a glorious slaughter of them in the bush. Eh? What do you think?
+Say?' He positively danced, the bloodthirsty little gingery beggar.
+And he had nearly fainted when he saw the wounded man! I could not help
+saying, 'You made a glorious lot of smoke, anyhow.' I had seen, from the
+way the tops of the bushes rustled and flew, that almost all the shots
+had gone too high. You can't hit anything unless you take aim and fire
+from the shoulder; but these chaps fired from the hip with their eyes
+shut. The retreat, I maintained--and I was right--was caused by the
+screeching of the steam-whistle. Upon this they forgot Kurtz, and began
+to howl at me with indignant protests.
+
+"The manager stood by the wheel murmuring confidentially about the
+necessity of getting well away down the river before dark at all events,
+when I saw in the distance a clearing on the river-side and the outlines
+of some sort of building. 'What's this?' I asked. He clapped his hands
+in wonder. 'The station!' he cried. I edged in at once, still going
+half-speed.
+
+"Through my glasses I saw the slope of a hill interspersed with rare
+trees and perfectly free from undergrowth. A long decaying building on
+the summit was half buried in the high grass; the large holes in the
+peaked roof gaped black from afar; the jungle and the woods made a
+background. There was no inclosure or fence of any kind; but there had
+been one apparently, for near the house half-a-dozen slim posts remained
+in a row, roughly trimmed, and with their upper ends ornamented with
+round carved balls. The rails, or whatever there had been between, had
+disappeared. Of course the forest surrounded all that. The river-bank
+was clear, and on the water-side I saw a white man under a hat like a
+cart-wheel beckoning persistently with his whole arm. Examining the
+edge of the forest above and below, I was almost certain I could see
+movements--human forms gliding here and there. I steamed past prudently,
+then stopped the engines and let her drift down. The man on the shore
+began to shout, urging us to land. 'We have been attacked,' screamed
+the manager. 'I know--I know. It's all right,' yelled back the other, as
+cheerful as you please. 'Come along. It's all right. I am glad.'
+
+"His aspect reminded me of something I had seen--something funny I had
+seen somewhere. As I maneuvered to get alongside, I was asking myself,
+'What does this fellow look like?' Suddenly I got it. He looked like
+a harlequin. His clothes had been made of some stuff that was brown
+holland probably, but it was covered with patches all over, with bright
+patches, blue, red, and yellow,--patches on the back, patches on front,
+patches on elbows, on knees; colored binding round his jacket, scarlet
+edging at the bottom of his trousers; and the sunshine made him look
+extremely gay and wonderfully neat withal, because you could see how
+beautifully all this patching had been done. A beardless, boyish face,
+very fair, no features to speak of, nose peeling, little blue eyes,
+smiles and frowns chasing each other over that open countenance like
+sunshine and shadow on a windswept plain. 'Look out, captain!' he
+cried; 'there's a snag lodged in here last night.' What! Another snag? I
+confess I swore shamefully. I had nearly holed my cripple, to finish off
+that charming trip. The harlequin on the bank turned his little pug nose
+up to me. 'You English?' he asked, all smiles. 'Are you?' I shouted from
+the wheel. The smiles vanished, and he shook his head as if sorry for
+my disappointment. Then he brightened up. 'Never mind!' he cried
+encouragingly. 'Are we in time?' I asked. 'He is up there,' he replied,
+with a toss of the head up the hill, and becoming gloomy all of a
+sudden. His face was like the autumn sky, overcast one moment and bright
+the next.
+
+"When the manager, escorted by the pilgrims, all of them armed to the
+teeth, had gone to the house, this chap came on board. 'I say, I
+don't like this. These natives are in the bush,' I said. He assured me
+earnestly it was all right. 'They are simple people,' he added; 'well,
+I am glad you came. It took me all my time to keep them off.' 'But you
+said it was all right,' I cried. 'Oh, they meant no harm,' he said; and
+as I stared he corrected himself, 'Not exactly.' Then vivaciously, 'My
+faith, your pilot-house wants a clean up!' In the next breath he advised
+me to keep enough steam on the boiler to blow the whistle in case of any
+trouble. 'One good screech will do more for you than all your rifles.
+They are simple people,' he repeated. He rattled away at such a rate
+he quite overwhelmed me. He seemed to be trying to make up for lots of
+silence, and actually hinted, laughing, that such was the case. 'Don't
+you talk with Mr. Kurtz?' I said. 'You don't talk with that man--you
+listen to him,' he exclaimed with severe exaltation. 'But now--' He
+waved his arm, and in the twinkling of an eye was in the uttermost
+depths of despondency. In a moment he came up again with a jump,
+possessed himself of both my hands, shook them continuously, while he
+gabbled: 'Brother sailor . . . honor . . . pleasure . . . delight . . .
+introduce myself . . . Russian . . . son of an arch-priest . . .
+Government of Tambov . . . What? Tobacco! English tobacco; the excellent
+English tobacco! Now, that's brotherly. Smoke? Where's a sailor that
+does not smoke?'
+
+"The pipe soothed him, and gradually I made out he had run away from
+school, had gone to sea in a Russian ship; ran away again; served some
+time in English ships; was now reconciled with the arch-priest. He made
+a point of that. 'But when one is young one must see things, gather
+experience, ideas; enlarge the mind.' 'Here!' I interrupted. 'You can
+never tell! Here I have met Mr. Kurtz,' he said, youthfully solemn and
+reproachful. I held my tongue after that. It appears he had persuaded a
+Dutch trading-house on the coast to fit him out with stores and goods,
+and had started for the interior with a light heart, and no more idea of
+what would happen to him than a baby. He had been wandering about that
+river for nearly two years alone, cut off from everybody and everything.
+'I am not so young as I look. I am twenty-five,' he said. 'At first old
+Van Shuyten would tell me to go to the devil,' he narrated with keen
+enjoyment; 'but I stuck to him, and talked and talked, till at last he
+got afraid I would talk the hind-leg off his favorite dog, so he gave
+me some cheap things and a few guns, and told me he hoped he would never
+see my face again. Good old Dutchman, Van Shuyten. I've sent him one
+small lot of ivory a year ago, so that he can't call me a little thief
+when I get back. I hope he got it. And for the rest I don't care. I had
+some wood stacked for you. That was my old house. Did you see?'
+
+"I gave him Towson's book. He made as though he would kiss me, but
+restrained himself. 'The only book I had left, and I thought I had lost
+it,' he said, looking at it ecstatically. 'So many accidents happen to
+a man going about alone, you know. Canoes get upset sometimes--and
+sometimes you've got to clear out so quick when the people get angry.'
+He thumbed the pages. 'You made notes in Russian?' I asked. He nodded.
+'I thought they were written in cipher,' I said. He laughed, then became
+serious. 'I had lots of trouble to keep these people off,' he said. 'Did
+they want to kill you?' I asked. 'Oh no!' he cried, and checked
+himself. 'Why did they attack us?' I pursued. He hesitated, then
+said shamefacedly, 'They don't want him to go.' 'Don't they?' I said,
+curiously. He nodded a nod full of mystery and wisdom. 'I tell you,' he
+cried, 'this man has enlarged my mind.' He opened his arms wide, staring
+at me with his little blue eyes that were perfectly round."
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+"I looked at him, lost in astonishment. There he was before me, in
+motley, as though he had absconded from a troupe of mimes, enthusiastic,
+fabulous. His very existence was improbable, inexplicable, and
+altogether bewildering. He was an insoluble problem. It was
+inconceivable how he had existed, how he had succeeded in getting so
+far, how he had managed to remain--why he did not instantly disappear.
+'I went a little farther,' he said, 'then still a little farther--till
+I had gone so far that I don't know how I'll ever get back. Never mind.
+Plenty time. I can manage. You take Kurtz away quick--quick--I tell
+you.' The glamour of youth enveloped his particolored rags, his
+destitution, his loneliness, the essential desolation of his futile
+wanderings. For months--for years--his life hadn't been worth a day's
+purchase; and there he was gallantly, thoughtlessly alive, to all
+appearance indestructible solely by the virtue of his few years and
+of his unreflecting audacity. I was seduced into something like
+admiration--like envy. Glamour urged him on, glamour kept him unscathed.
+He surely wanted nothing from the wilderness but space to breathe in and
+to push on through. His need was to exist, and to move onwards at
+the greatest possible risk, and with a maximum of privation. If the
+absolutely pure, uncalculating, unpractical spirit of adventure had ever
+ruled a human being, it ruled this be-patched youth. I almost envied
+him the possession of this modest and clear flame. It seemed to have
+consumed all thought of self so completely, that, even while he was
+talking to you, you forgot that it was he--the man before your eyes--who
+had gone through these things. I did not envy him his devotion to Kurtz,
+though. He had not meditated over it. It came to him, and he accepted it
+with a sort of eager fatalism. I must say that to me it appeared about
+the most dangerous thing in every way he had come upon so far.
+
+"They had come together unavoidably, like two ships becalmed near
+each other, and lay rubbing sides at last. I suppose Kurtz wanted an
+audience, because on a certain occasion, when encamped in the forest,
+they had talked all night, or more probably Kurtz had talked. 'We talked
+of everything,' he said, quite transported at the recollection. 'I
+forgot there was such a thing as sleep. The night did not seem to last
+an hour. Everything! Everything! . . . Of love too.' 'Ah, he talked to
+you of love!' I said, much amused. 'It isn't what you think,' he cried,
+almost passionately. 'It was in general. He made me see things--things.'
+
+"He threw his arms up. We were on deck at the time, and the headman
+of my wood-cutters, lounging near by, turned upon him his heavy and
+glittering eyes. I looked around, and I don't know why, but I assure you
+that never, never before, did this land, this river, this jungle, the
+very arch of this blazing sky, appear to me so hopeless and so dark, so
+impenetrable to human thought, so pitiless to human weakness. 'And, ever
+since, you have been with him, of course?' I said.
+
+"On the contrary. It appears their intercourse had been very much broken
+by various causes. He had, as he informed me proudly, managed to nurse
+Kurtz through two illnesses (he alluded to it as you would to some risky
+feat), but as a rule Kurtz wandered alone, far in the depths of the
+forest. 'Very often coming to this station, I had to wait days and
+days before he would turn up,' he said. 'Ah, it was worth waiting
+for!--sometimes.' 'What was he doing? exploring or what?' I asked. 'Oh
+yes, of course;' he had discovered lots of villages, a lake too--he
+did not know exactly in what direction; it was dangerous to inquire
+too much--but mostly his expeditions had been for ivory. 'But he had no
+goods to trade with by that time,' I objected. 'There's a good lot of
+cartridges left even yet,' he answered, looking away. 'To speak plainly,
+he raided the country,' I said. He nodded. 'Not alone, surely!' He
+muttered something about the villages round that lake. 'Kurtz got the
+tribe to follow him, did he?' I suggested. He fidgeted a little. 'They
+adored him,' he said. The tone of these words was so extraordinary that
+I looked at him searchingly. It was curious to see his mingled eagerness
+and reluctance to speak of Kurtz. The man filled his life, occupied his
+thoughts, swayed his emotions. 'What can you expect?' he burst out; 'he
+came to them with thunder and lightning, you know--and they had never
+seen anything like it--and very terrible. He could be very terrible.
+You can't judge Mr. Kurtz as you would an ordinary man. No, no, no!
+Now--just to give you an idea--I don't mind telling you, he wanted to
+shoot me too one day--but I don't judge him.' 'Shoot you!' I cried.
+'What for?' 'Well, I had a small lot of ivory the chief of that village
+near my house gave me. You see I used to shoot game for them. Well,
+he wanted it, and wouldn't hear reason. He declared he would shoot me
+unless I gave him the ivory and then cleared out of the country, because
+he could do so, and had a fancy for it, and there was nothing on earth
+to prevent him killing whom he jolly well pleased. And it was true too.
+I gave him the ivory. What did I care! But I didn't clear out. No, no. I
+couldn't leave him. I had to be careful, of course, till we got friendly
+again for a time. He had his second illness then. Afterwards I had to
+keep out of the way; but I didn't mind. He was living for the most part
+in those villages on the lake. When he came down to the river, sometimes
+he would take to me, and sometimes it was better for me to be careful.
+This man suffered too much. He hated all this, and somehow he couldn't
+get away. When I had a chance I begged him to try and leave while there
+was time; I offered to go back with him. And he would say yes, and then
+he would remain; go off on another ivory hunt; disappear for weeks;
+forget himself amongst these people--forget himself--you know.' 'Why!
+he's mad,' I said. He protested indignantly. Mr. Kurtz couldn't be mad.
+If I had heard him talk, only two days ago, I wouldn't dare hint at
+such a thing. . . . I had taken up my binoculars while we talked and was
+looking at the shore, sweeping the limit of the forest at each side and
+at the back of the house. The consciousness of there being people in
+that bush, so silent, so quiet--as silent and quiet as the ruined house
+on the hill--made me uneasy. There was no sign on the face of nature
+of this amazing tale that was not so much told as suggested to me in
+desolate exclamations, completed by shrugs, in interrupted phrases, in
+hints ending in deep sighs. The woods were unmoved, like a mask--heavy,
+like the closed door of a prison--they looked with their air of hidden
+knowledge, of patient expectation, of unapproachable silence. The
+Russian was explaining to me that it was only lately that Mr. Kurtz had
+come down to the river, bringing along with him all the fighting men of
+that lake tribe. He had been absent for several months--getting himself
+adored, I suppose--and had come down unexpectedly, with the intention to
+all appearance of making a raid either across the river or down stream.
+Evidently the appetite for more ivory had got the better of the--what
+shall I say?--less material aspirations. However he had got much worse
+suddenly. 'I heard he was lying helpless, and so I came up--took my
+chance,' said the Russian. 'Oh, he is bad, very bad.' I directed my
+glass to the house. There were no signs of life, but there was the
+ruined roof, the long mud wall peeping above the grass, with three
+little square window-holes, no two of the same size; all this brought
+within reach of my hand, as it were. And then I made a brusque movement,
+and one of the remaining posts of that vanished fence leaped up in the
+field of my glass. You remember I told you I had been struck at the
+distance by certain attempts at ornamentation, rather remarkable in the
+ruinous aspect of the place. Now I had suddenly a nearer view, and its
+first result was to make me throw my head back as if before a blow. Then
+I went carefully from post to post with my glass, and I saw my mistake.
+These round knobs were not ornamental but symbolic; they were expressive
+and puzzling, striking and disturbing--food for thought and also for
+the vultures if there had been any looking down from the sky; but at all
+events for such ants as were industrious enough to ascend the pole.
+They would have been even more impressive, those heads on the stakes, if
+their faces had not been turned to the house. Only one, the first I had
+made out, was facing my way. I was not so shocked as you may think. The
+start back I had given was really nothing but a movement of surprise.
+I had expected to see a knob of wood there, you know. I returned
+deliberately to the first I had seen--and there it was, black, dried,
+sunken, with closed eyelids,--a head that seemed to sleep at the top of
+that pole, and, with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line
+of the teeth, was smiling too, smiling continuously at some endless and
+jocose dream of that eternal slumber.
+
+"I am not disclosing any trade secrets. In fact the manager said
+afterwards that Mr. Kurtz's methods had ruined the district. I have no
+opinion on that point, but I want you clearly to understand that there
+was nothing exactly profitable in these heads being there. They only
+showed that Mr. Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his
+various lusts, that there was something wanting in him--some small
+matter which, when the pressing need arose, could not be found under
+his magnificent eloquence. Whether he knew of this deficiency himself I
+can't say. I think the knowledge came to him at last--only at the very
+last. But the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a
+terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered
+to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he
+had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude--and the
+whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him
+because he was hollow at the core. . . . I put down the glass, and the
+head that had appeared near enough to be spoken to seemed at once to
+have leaped away from me into inaccessible distance.
+
+"The admirer of Mr. Kurtz was a bit crestfallen. In a hurried,
+indistinct voice he began to assure me he had not dared to take
+these--say, symbols--down. He was not afraid of the natives; they would
+not stir till Mr. Kurtz gave the word. His ascendency was extraordinary.
+The camps of these people surrounded the place, and the chiefs came
+every day to see him. They would crawl. . . . 'I don't want to know
+anything of the ceremonies used when approaching Mr. Kurtz,' I shouted.
+Curious, this feeling that came over me that such details would be more
+intolerable than those heads drying on the stakes under Mr. Kurtz's
+windows. After all, that was only a savage sight, while I seemed at
+one bound to have been transported into some lightless region of subtle
+horrors, where pure, uncomplicated savagery was a positive relief, being
+something that had a right to exist--obviously--in the sunshine. The
+young man looked at me with surprise. I suppose it did not occur to him
+Mr. Kurtz was no idol of mine. He forgot I hadn't heard any of these
+splendid monologues on, what was it? on love, justice, conduct of
+life--or what not. If it had come to crawling before Mr. Kurtz, he
+crawled as much as the veriest savage of them all. I had no idea of the
+conditions, he said: these heads were the heads of rebels. I shocked him
+excessively by laughing. Rebels! What would be the next definition I
+was to hear? There had been enemies, criminals, workers--and these
+were rebels. Those rebellious heads looked very subdued to me on their
+sticks. 'You don't know how such a life tries a man like Kurtz,' cried
+Kurtz's last disciple. 'Well, and you?' I said. 'I! I! I am a simple
+man. I have no great thoughts. I want nothing from anybody. How can
+you compare me to . . .?' His feelings were too much for speech, and
+suddenly he broke down. 'I don't understand,' he groaned. 'I've been
+doing my best to keep him alive, and that's enough. I had no hand in
+all this. I have no abilities. There hasn't been a drop of medicine or a
+mouthful of invalid food for months here. He was shamefully abandoned.
+A man like this, with such ideas. Shamefully! Shamefully! I--I--haven't
+slept for the last ten nights. . . .'
+
+"His voice lost itself in the calm of the evening. The long shadows of
+the forest had slipped down hill while we talked, had gone far beyond
+the ruined hovel, beyond the symbolic row of stakes. All this was in the
+gloom, while we down there were yet in the sunshine, and the stretch
+of the river abreast of the clearing glittered in a still and dazzling
+splendor, with a murky and over-shadowed bend above and below. Not a
+living soul was seen on the shore. The bushes did not rustle.
+
+"Suddenly round the corner of the house a group of men appeared, as
+though they had come up from the ground. They waded waist-deep in the
+grass, in a compact body, bearing an improvised stretcher in their
+midst. Instantly, in the emptiness of the landscape, a cry arose whose
+shrillness pierced the still air like a sharp arrow flying straight to
+the very heart of the land; and, as if by enchantment, streams of human
+beings--of naked human beings--with spears in their hands, with bows,
+with shields, with wild glances and savage movements, were poured into
+the clearing by the dark-faced and pensive forest. The bushes shook, the
+grass swayed for a time, and then everything stood still in attentive
+immobility.
+
+"'Now, if he does not say the right thing to them we are all done for,'
+said the Russian at my elbow. The knot of men with the stretcher had
+stopped too, half-way to the steamer, as if petrified. I saw the man on
+the stretcher sit up, lank and with an uplifted arm, above the shoulders
+of the bearers. 'Let us hope that the man who can talk so well of love
+in general will find some particular reason to spare us this time,' I
+said. I resented bitterly the absurd danger of our situation, as if
+to be at the mercy of that atrocious phantom had been a dishonoring
+necessity. I could not hear a sound, but through my glasses I saw the
+thin arm extended commandingly, the lower jaw moving, the eyes of
+that apparition shining darkly far in its bony head that nodded with
+grotesque jerks. Kurtz--Kurtz--that means short in German--don't it?
+Well, the name was as true as everything else in his life--and death.
+He looked at least seven feet long. His covering had fallen off, and his
+body emerged from it pitiful and appalling as from a winding-sheet. I
+could see the cage of his ribs all astir, the bones of his arm waving.
+It was as though an animated image of death carved out of old ivory had
+been shaking its hand with menaces at a motionless crowd of men made of
+dark and glittering bronze. I saw him open his mouth wide--it gave him
+a weirdly voracious aspect, as though he had wanted to swallow all the
+air, all the earth, all the men before him. A deep voice reached
+me faintly. He must have been shouting. He fell back suddenly. The
+stretcher shook as the bearers staggered forward again, and almost at
+the same time I noticed that the crowd of savages was vanishing without
+any perceptible movement of retreat, as if the forest that had ejected
+these beings so suddenly had drawn them in again as the breath is drawn
+in a long aspiration.
+
+"Some of the pilgrims behind the stretcher carried his arms--two
+shot-guns, a heavy rifle, and a light revolver-carbine--the thunderbolts
+of that pitiful Jupiter. The manager bent over him murmuring as
+he walked beside his head. They laid him down in one of the little
+cabins--just a room for a bed-place and a camp-stool or two, you know.
+We had brought his belated correspondence, and a lot of torn envelopes
+and open letters littered his bed. His hand roamed feebly amongst these
+papers. I was struck by the fire of his eyes and the composed languor of
+his expression. It was not so much the exhaustion of disease. He did not
+seem in pain. This shadow looked satiated and calm, as though for the
+moment it had had its fill of all the emotions.
+
+"He rustled one of the letters, and looking straight in my face said,
+'I am glad.' Somebody had been writing to him about me. These special
+recommendations were turning up again. The volume of tone he emitted
+without effort, almost without the trouble of moving his lips, amazed
+me. A voice! a voice! It was grave, profound, vibrating, while the man
+did not seem capable of a whisper. However, he had enough strength in
+him--factitious no doubt--to very nearly make an end of us, as you shall
+hear directly.
+
+"The manager appeared silently in the doorway; I stepped out at once
+and he drew the curtain after me. The Russian, eyed curiously by the
+pilgrims, was staring at the shore. I followed the direction of his
+glance.
+
+"Dark human shapes could be made out in the distance, flitting
+indistinctly against the gloomy border of the forest, and near the river
+two bronze figures, leaning on tall spears, stood in the sunlight under
+fantastic headdresses of spotted skins, warlike and still in statuesque
+repose. And from right to left along the lighted shore moved a wild and
+gorgeous apparition of a woman.
+
+"She walked with measured steps, draped in striped and fringed cloths,
+treading the earth proudly, with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous
+ornaments. She carried her head high; her hair was done in the shape of
+a helmet; she had brass leggings to the knee, brass wire gauntlets to
+the elbow, a crimson spot on her tawny cheek, innumerable necklaces of
+glass beads on her neck; bizarre things, charms, gifts of witch-men,
+that hung about her, glittered and trembled at every step. She must have
+had the value of several elephant tusks upon her. She was savage and
+superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and
+stately in her deliberate progress. And in the hush that had fallen
+suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the
+colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her,
+pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous
+and passionate soul.
+
+"She came abreast of the steamer, stood still, and faced us. Her long
+shadow fell to the water's edge. Her face had a tragic and fierce
+aspect of wild sorrow and of dumb pain mingled with the fear of some
+struggling, half-shaped resolve. She stood looking at us without a
+stir and like the wilderness itself, with an air of brooding over an
+inscrutable purpose. A whole minute passed, and then she made a step
+forward. There was a low jingle, a glint of yellow metal, a sway of
+fringed draperies, and she stopped as if her heart had failed her. The
+young fellow by my side growled. The pilgrims murmured at my back.
+She looked at us all as if her life had depended upon the unswerving
+steadiness of her glance. Suddenly she opened her bared arms and threw
+them up rigid above her head, as though in an uncontrollable desire to
+touch the sky, and at the same time the swift shadows darted out on the
+earth, swept around on the river, gathering the steamer into a shadowy
+embrace. A formidable silence hung over the scene.
+
+"She turned away slowly, walked on, following the bank, and passed into
+the bushes to the left. Once only her eyes gleamed back at us in the
+dusk of the thickets before she disappeared.
+
+"'If she had offered to come aboard I really think I would have tried to
+shoot her,' said the man of patches, nervously. 'I had been risking my
+life every day for the last fortnight to keep her out of the house. She
+got in one day and kicked up a row about those miserable rags I picked
+up in the storeroom to mend my clothes with. I wasn't decent. At least
+it must have been that, for she talked like a fury to Kurtz for an hour,
+pointing at me now and then. I don't understand the dialect of this
+tribe. Luckily for me, I fancy Kurtz felt too ill that day to care, or
+there would have been mischief. I don't understand. . . . No--it's too
+much for me. Ah, well, it's all over now.'
+
+"At this moment I heard Kurtz's deep voice behind the curtain, 'Save
+me!--save the ivory, you mean. Don't tell me. Save _me!_ Why, I've had
+to save you. You are interrupting my plans now. Sick! Sick! Not so sick
+as you would like to believe. Never mind. I'll carry my ideas out
+yet--I will return. I'll show you what can be done. You with your little
+peddling notions--you are interfering with me. I will return. I . . .'
+
+"The manager came out. He did me the honor to take me under the arm and
+lead me aside. 'He is very low, very low,' he said. He considered it
+necessary to sigh, but neglected to be consistently sorrowful. 'We have
+done all we could for him--haven't we? But there is no disguising the
+fact, Mr. Kurtz has done more harm than good to the Company. He did
+not see the time was not ripe for vigorous action. Cautiously,
+cautiously--that's my principle. We must be cautious yet. The district
+is closed to us for a time. Deplorable! Upon the whole, the trade will
+suffer. I don't deny there is a remarkable quantity of ivory--mostly
+fossil. We must save it, at all events--but look how precarious the
+position is--and why? Because the method is unsound.' 'Do you,' said I,
+looking at the shore, 'call it "unsound method"?' 'Without doubt,' he
+exclaimed, hotly. 'Don't you?' . . . 'No method at all,' I murmured
+after a while. 'Exactly,' he exulted. 'I anticipated this. Shows a
+complete want of judgment. It is my duty to point it out in the proper
+quarter.' 'Oh,' said I, 'that fellow--what's his name?--the brickmaker,
+will make a readable report for you.' He appeared confounded for a
+moment. It seemed to me I had never breathed an atmosphere so vile,
+and I turned mentally to Kurtz for relief--positively for relief.
+'Nevertheless I think Mr. Kurtz is a remarkable man,' I said with
+emphasis. He started, dropped on me a cold heavy glance, said very
+quietly, 'He _was_,' and turned his back on me. My hour of favor was
+over; I found myself lumped along with Kurtz as a partisan of methods
+for which the time was not ripe: I was unsound! Ah! but it was something
+to have at least a choice of nightmares.
+
+"I had turned to the wilderness really, not to Mr. Kurtz, who, I was
+ready to admit, was as good as buried. And for a moment it seemed to me
+as if I also were buried in a vast grave full of unspeakable secrets. I
+felt an intolerable weight oppressing my breast, the smell of the damp
+earth, the unseen presence of victorious corruption, the darkness of an
+impenetrable night. . . . The Russian tapped me on the shoulder. I heard
+him mumbling and stammering something about 'brother seaman--couldn't
+conceal--knowledge of matters that would affect Mr. Kurtz's reputation.'
+I waited. For him evidently Mr. Kurtz was not in his grave; I suspect
+that for him Mr. Kurtz was one of the immortals. 'Well!' said I at last,
+'speak out. As it happens, I am Mr. Kurtz's friend--in a way.'
+
+"He stated with a good deal of formality that had we not been 'of the
+same profession,' he would have kept the matter to himself without
+regard to consequences. 'He suspected there was an active ill-will
+towards him on the part of these white men that--' 'You are right,' I
+said, remembering a certain conversation I had overheard. 'The manager
+thinks you ought to be hanged.' He showed a concern at this intelligence
+which amused me at first. 'I had better get out of the way quietly,' he
+said, earnestly. 'I can do no more for Kurtz now, and they would soon
+find some excuse. What's to stop them? There's a military post three
+hundred miles from here.' 'Well, upon my word,' said I, 'perhaps you
+had better go if you have any friends amongst the savages near by.'
+'Plenty,' he said. 'They are simple people--and I want nothing, you
+know.' He stood biting his lips, then: 'I don't want any harm to happen
+to these whites here, but of course I was thinking of Mr. Kurtz's
+reputation--but you are a brother seaman and--' 'All right,' said I,
+after a time. 'Mr. Kurtz's reputation is safe with me.' I did not know
+how truly I spoke.
+
+"He informed me, lowering his voice, that it was Kurtz who had ordered
+the attack to be made on the steamer. 'He hated sometimes the idea of
+being taken away--and then again. . . . But I don't understand these
+matters. I am a simple man. He thought it would scare you away--that you
+would give it up, thinking him dead. I could not stop him. Oh, I had an
+awful time of it this last month.' 'Very well,' I said. 'He is all right
+now.' 'Ye-e-es,' he muttered, not very convinced apparently. 'Thanks,'
+said I; 'I shall keep my eyes open.' 'But quiet--eh?' he urged,
+anxiously. 'It would be awful for his reputation if anybody here--' I
+promised a complete discretion with great gravity. 'I have a canoe and
+three black fellows waiting not very far. I am off. Could you give me a
+few Martini-Henry cartridges?' I could, and did, with proper secrecy. He
+helped himself, with a wink at me, to a handful of my tobacco. 'Between
+sailors--you know--good English tobacco.' At the door of the pilot-house
+he turned round--' I say, haven't you a pair of shoes you could spare?'
+He raised one leg. 'Look.' The soles were tied with knotted strings
+sandal-wise under his bare feet. I rooted out an old pair, at which he
+looked with admiration before tucking it under his left arm. One of his
+pockets (bright red) was bulging with cartridges, from the other (dark
+blue) peeped 'Towson's Inquiry,' &c., &c. He seemed to think himself
+excellently well equipped for a renewed encounter with the wilderness.
+'Ah! I'll never, never meet such a man again. You ought to have heard
+him recite poetry--his own too it was, he told me. Poetry!' He rolled
+his eyes at the recollection of these delights. 'Oh, he enlarged my
+mind!' 'Goodby,' said I. He shook hands and vanished in the night.
+Sometimes I ask myself whether I had ever really seen him--whether it
+was possible to meet such a phenomenon! . . .
+
+"When I woke up shortly after midnight his warning came to my mind with
+its hint of danger that seemed, in the starred darkness, real enough to
+make me get up for the purpose of having a look round. On the hill a
+big fire burned, illuminating fitfully a crooked corner of the
+station-house. One of the agents with a picket of a few of our blacks,
+armed for the purpose, was keeping guard over the ivory; but deep within
+the forest, red gleams that wavered, that seemed to sink and rise from
+the ground amongst confused columnar shapes of intense blackness, showed
+the exact position of the camp where Mr. Kurtz's adorers were keeping
+their uneasy vigil. The monotonous beating of a big drum filled the air
+with muffled shocks and a lingering vibration. A steady droning sound of
+many men chanting each to himself some weird incantation came out from
+the black, flat wall of the woods as the humming of bees comes out of
+a hive, and had a strange narcotic effect upon my half-awake senses.
+I believe I dozed off leaning over the rail, till an abrupt burst of
+yells, an overwhelming outbreak of a pent-up and mysterious frenzy, woke
+me up in a bewildered wonder. It was cut short all at once, and the
+low droning went on with an effect of audible and soothing silence. I
+glanced casually into the little cabin. A light was burning within, but
+Mr. Kurtz was not there.
+
+"I think I would have raised an outcry if I had believed my eyes. But I
+didn't believe them at first--the thing seemed so impossible. The fact
+is I was completely unnerved by a sheer blank fright, pure abstract
+terror, unconnected with any distinct shape of physical danger. What
+made this emotion so overpowering was--how shall I define it?--the moral
+shock I received, as if something altogether monstrous, intolerable to
+thought and odious to the soul, had been thrust upon me unexpectedly.
+This lasted of course the merest fraction of a second, and then the
+usual sense of commonplace, deadly danger, the possibility of a sudden
+onslaught and massacre, or something of the kind, which I saw impending,
+was positively welcome and composing. It pacified me, in fact, so much,
+that I did not raise an alarm.
+
+"There was an agent buttoned up inside an ulster and sleeping on a chair
+on deck within three feet of me. The yells had not awakened him; he
+snored very slightly; I left him to his slumbers and leaped ashore. I
+did not betray Mr. Kurtz--it was ordered I should never betray him--it
+was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice. I was
+anxious to deal with this shadow by myself alone,--and to this day I
+don't know why I was so jealous of sharing with anyone the peculiar
+blackness of that experience.
+
+"As soon as I got on the bank I saw a trail--a broad trail through the
+grass. I remember the exultation with which I said to myself, 'He can't
+walk--he is crawling on all-fours--I've got him.' The grass was wet
+with dew. I strode rapidly with clenched fists. I fancy I had some vague
+notion of falling upon him and giving him a drubbing. I don't know. I
+had some imbecile thoughts. The knitting old woman with the cat obtruded
+herself upon my memory as a most improper person to be sitting at the
+other end of such an affair. I saw a row of pilgrims squirting lead in
+the air out of Winchesters held to the hip. I thought I would never get
+back to the steamer, and imagined myself living alone and unarmed in the
+woods to an advanced age. Such silly things--you know. And I remember
+I confounded the beat of the drum with the beating of my heart, and was
+pleased at its calm regularity.
+
+"I kept to the track though--then stopped to listen. The night was very
+clear: a dark blue space, sparkling with dew and starlight, in which
+black things stood very still. I thought I could see a kind of motion
+ahead of me. I was strangely cocksure of everything that night. I
+actually left the track and ran in a wide semicircle (I verily believe
+chuckling to myself) so as to get in front of that stir, of that motion
+I had seen--if indeed I had seen anything. I was circumventing Kurtz as
+though it had been a boyish game.
+
+"I came upon him, and, if he had not heard me coming, I would have
+fallen over him too, but he got up in time. He rose, unsteady, long,
+pale, indistinct, like a vapor exhaled by the earth, and swayed
+slightly, misty and silent before me; while at my back the fires loomed
+between the trees, and the murmur of many voices issued from the forest.
+I had cut him off cleverly; but when actually confronting him I seemed
+to come to my senses, I saw the danger in its right proportion. It was
+by no means over yet. Suppose he began to shout? Though he could hardly
+stand, there was still plenty of vigor in his voice. 'Go away--hide
+yourself,' he said, in that profound tone. It was very awful. I glanced
+back. We were within thirty yards from the nearest fire. A black figure
+stood up, strode on long black legs, waving long black arms, across the
+glow. It had horns--antelope horns, I think--on its head. Some sorcerer,
+some witch-man, no doubt: it looked fiend-like enough. 'Do you know what
+you are doing?' I whispered. 'Perfectly,' he answered, raising his voice
+for that single word: it sounded to me far off and yet loud, like a hail
+through a speaking-trumpet. 'If he makes a row we are lost,' I thought
+to myself. This clearly was not a case for fisticuffs, even apart from
+the very natural aversion I had to beat that Shadow--this wandering and
+tormented thing. 'You will be lost,' I said--'utterly lost.' One gets
+sometimes such a flash of inspiration, you know. I did say the right
+thing, though indeed he could not have been more irretrievably lost than
+he was at this very moment, when the foundations of our intimacy were
+being laid--to endure--to endure--even to the end--even beyond.
+
+"'I had immense plans,' he muttered irresolutely. 'Yes,' said I; 'but if
+you try to shout I'll smash your head with--' There was not a stick or
+a stone near. 'I will throttle you for good,' I corrected myself. 'I was
+on the threshold of great things,' he pleaded, in a voice of longing,
+with a wistfulness of tone that made my blood run cold. 'And now for
+this stupid scoundrel--' 'Your success in Europe is assured in any
+case,' I affirmed, steadily. I did not want to have the throttling of
+him, you understand--and indeed it would have been very little use for
+any practical purpose. I tried to break the spell--the heavy, mute spell
+of the wilderness--that seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the
+awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of gratified
+and monstrous passions. This alone, I was convinced, had driven him out
+to the edge of the forest, to the bush, towards the gleam of fires, the
+throb of drums, the drone of weird incantations; this alone had beguiled
+his unlawful soul beyond the bounds of permitted aspirations. And, don't
+you see, the terror of the position was not in being knocked on the
+head--though I had a very lively sense of that danger too--but in this,
+that I had to deal with a being to whom I could not appeal in the
+name of anything high or low. I had, even like the niggers, to invoke
+him--himself his own exalted and incredible degradation. There was
+nothing either above or below him, and I knew it. He had kicked himself
+loose of the earth. Confound the man! he had kicked the very earth to
+pieces. He was alone, and I before him did not know whether I stood
+on the ground or floated in the air. I've been telling you what we
+said--repeating the phrases we pronounced,--but what's the good? They
+were common everyday words,--the familiar, vague sounds exchanged on
+every waking day of life. But what of that? They had behind them, to my
+mind, the terrific suggestiveness of words heard in dreams, of phrases
+spoken in nightmares. Soul! If anybody had ever struggled with a soul,
+I am the man. And I wasn't arguing with a lunatic either. Believe me
+or not, his intelligence was perfectly clear--concentrated, it is true,
+upon himself with horrible intensity, yet clear; and therein was my only
+chance--barring, of course, the killing him there and then, which wasn't
+so good, on account of unavoidable noise. But his soul was mad. Being
+alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself, and, by heavens! I
+tell you, it had gone mad. I had--for my sins, I suppose--to go through
+the ordeal of looking into it myself. No eloquence could have been so
+withering to one's belief in mankind as his final burst of sincerity.
+He struggled with himself, too. I saw it,--I heard it. I saw the
+inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and
+no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself. I kept my head pretty well;
+but when I had him at last stretched on the couch, I wiped my forehead,
+while my legs shook under me as though I had carried half a ton on my
+back down that hill. And yet I had only supported him, his bony arm
+clasped round my neck--and he was not much heavier than a child.
+
+"When next day we left at noon, the crowd, of whose presence behind the
+curtain of trees I had been acutely conscious all the time, flowed out
+of the woods again, filled the clearing, covered the slope with a mass
+of naked, breathing, quivering, bronze bodies. I steamed up a bit, then
+swung down-stream, and two thousand eyes followed the evolutions of
+the splashing, thumping, fierce river-demon beating the water with its
+terrible tail and breathing black smoke into the air. In front of the
+first rank, along the river, three men, plastered with bright red earth
+from head to foot, strutted to and fro restlessly. When we came abreast
+again, they faced the river, stamped their feet, nodded their horned
+heads, swayed their scarlet bodies; they shook towards the fierce
+river-demon a bunch of black feathers, a mangy skin with a pendent
+tail--something that looked like a dried gourd; they shouted
+periodically together strings of amazing words that resembled no sounds
+of human language; and the deep murmurs of the crowd, interrupted
+suddenly, were like the response of some satanic litany.
+
+"We had carried Kurtz into the pilot-house: there was more air there.
+Lying on the couch, he stared through the open shutter. There was an
+eddy in the mass of human bodies, and the woman with helmeted head and
+tawny cheeks rushed out to the very brink of the stream. She put out her
+hands, shouted something, and all that wild mob took up the shout in a
+roaring chorus of articulated, rapid, breathless utterance.
+
+"'Do you understand this?' I asked.
+
+"He kept on looking out past me with fiery, longing eyes, with a mingled
+expression of wistfulness and hate. He made no answer, but I saw a
+smile, a smile of indefinable meaning, appear on his colorless lips
+that a moment after twitched convulsively. 'Do I not?' he said slowly,
+gasping, as if the words had been torn out of him by a supernatural
+power.
+
+"I pulled the string of the whistle, and I did this because I saw the
+pilgrims on deck getting out their rifles with an air of anticipating a
+jolly lark. At the sudden screech there was a movement of abject terror
+through that wedged mass of bodies. 'Don't! Don't you frighten them
+away,' cried someone on deck disconsolately. I pulled the string
+time after time. They broke and ran, they leaped, they crouched, they
+swerved, they dodged the flying terror of the sound. The three red chaps
+had fallen flat, face down on the shore, as though they had been shot
+dead. Only the barbarous and superb woman did not so much as flinch,
+and stretched tragically her bare arms after us over the somber and
+glittering river.
+
+"And then that imbecile crowd down on the deck started their little fun,
+and I could see nothing more for smoke.
+
+"The brown current ran swiftly out of the heart of darkness, bearing us
+down towards the sea with twice the speed of our upward progress; and
+Kurtz's life was running swiftly too, ebbing, ebbing out of his heart
+into the sea of inexorable time. The manager was very placid, he had
+no vital anxieties now, he took us both in with a comprehensive and
+satisfied glance: the 'affair' had come off as well as could be wished.
+I saw the time approaching when I would be left alone of the party of
+'unsound method.' The pilgrims looked upon me with disfavor. I was,
+so to speak, numbered with the dead. It is strange how I accepted this
+unforeseen partnership, this choice of nightmares forced upon me in the
+tenebrous land invaded by these mean and greedy phantoms.
+
+"Kurtz discoursed. A voice! a voice! It rang deep to the very last. It
+survived his strength to hide in the magnificent folds of eloquence the
+barren darkness of his heart. Oh, he struggled! he struggled! The wastes
+of his weary brain were haunted by shadowy images now--images of wealth
+and fame revolving obsequiously round his unextinguishable gift of
+noble and lofty expression. My Intended, my station, my career, my
+ideas--these were the subjects for the occasional utterances of elevated
+sentiments. The shade of the original Kurtz frequented the bedside of
+the hollow sham, whose fate it was to be buried presently in the mold of
+primeval earth. But both the diabolic love and the unearthly hate of
+the mysteries it had penetrated fought for the possession of that
+soul satiated with primitive emotions, avid of lying fame, of sham
+distinction, of all the appearances of success and power.
+
+"Sometimes he was contemptibly childish. He desired to have kings meet
+him at railway-stations on his return from some ghastly Nowhere, where
+he intended to accomplish great things. 'You show them you have in you
+something that is really profitable, and then there will be no limits to
+the recognition of your ability,' he would say. 'Of course you must take
+care of the motives--right motives--always.' The long reaches that were
+like one and the same reach, monotonous bends that were exactly alike,
+slipped past the steamer with their multitude of secular trees looking
+patiently after this grimy fragment of another world, the forerunner
+of change, of conquest, of trade, of massacres, of blessings. I looked
+ahead--piloting. 'Close the shutter,' said Kurtz suddenly one day; 'I
+can't bear to look at this.' I did so. There was a silence. 'Oh, but I
+will wring your heart yet!' he cried at the invisible wilderness.
+
+"We broke down--as I had expected--and had to lie up for repairs at the
+head of an island. This delay was the first thing that shook
+Kurtz's confidence. One morning he gave me a packet of papers and a
+photograph,--the lot tied together with a shoe-string. 'Keep this for
+me,' he said. 'This noxious fool' (meaning the manager) 'is capable of
+prying into my boxes when I am not looking.' In the afternoon I saw him.
+He was lying on his back with closed eyes, and I withdrew quietly, but
+I heard him mutter, 'Live rightly, die, die . . .' I listened. There was
+nothing more. Was he rehearsing some speech in his sleep, or was it a
+fragment of a phrase from some newspaper article? He had been writing
+for the papers and meant to do so again, 'for the furthering of my
+ideas. It's a duty.'
+
+"His was an impenetrable darkness. I looked at him as you peer down at
+a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never
+shines. But I had not much time to give him, because I was helping the
+engine-driver to take to pieces the leaky cylinders, to straighten a
+bent connecting-rod, and in other such matters. I lived in an
+infernal mess of rust, filings, nuts, bolts, spanners, hammers,
+ratchet-drills--things I abominate, because I don't get on with them. I
+tended the little forge we fortunately had aboard; I toiled wearily in a
+wretched scrap-heap--unless I had the shakes too bad to stand.
+
+"One evening coming in with a candle I was startled to hear him say a
+little tremulously, 'I am lying here in the dark waiting for death.'
+The light was within a foot of his eyes. I forced myself to murmur, 'Oh,
+nonsense!' and stood over him as if transfixed.
+
+"Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have
+never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn't touched.
+I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that
+ivory face the expression of somber pride, of ruthless power, of craven
+terror--of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again
+in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme
+moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at
+some vision,--he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath--
+
+"'The horror! The horror!'
+
+"I blew the candle out and left the cabin. The pilgrims were dining in
+the mess-room, and I took my place opposite the manager, who lifted his
+eyes to give me a questioning glance, which I successfully ignored.
+He leaned back, serene, with that peculiar smile of his sealing the
+unexpressed depths of his meanness. A continuous shower of small flies
+streamed upon the lamp, upon the cloth, upon our hands and faces.
+Suddenly the manager's boy put his insolent black head in the doorway,
+and said in a tone of scathing contempt--
+
+"'Mistah Kurtz--he dead.'
+
+"All the pilgrims rushed out to see. I remained, and went on with my
+dinner. I believe I was considered brutally callous. However, I did not
+eat much. There was a lamp in there--light, don't you know--and outside
+it was so beastly, beastly dark. I went no more near the remarkable man
+who had pronounced a judgment upon the adventures of his soul on this
+earth. The voice was gone. What else had been there? But I am of course
+aware that next day the pilgrims buried something in a muddy hole.
+
+"And then they very nearly buried me.
+
+"However, as you see, I did not go to join Kurtz there and then. I did
+not. I remained to dream the nightmare out to the end, and to show
+my loyalty to Kurtz once more. Destiny. My destiny! Droll thing life
+is--that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose.
+The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself--that comes
+too late--a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with
+death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place
+in an impalpable grayness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around,
+without spectators, without clamor, without glory, without the great
+desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly
+atmosphere of tepid skepticism, without much belief in your own right,
+and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of
+ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think
+it to be. I was within a hair's-breadth of the last opportunity for
+pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would
+have nothing to say. This is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz was a
+remarkable man. He had something to say. He said it. Since I had peeped
+over the edge myself, I understand better the meaning of his stare, that
+could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to embrace
+the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that
+beat in the darkness. He had summed up--he had judged. 'The horror!' He
+was a remarkable man. After all, this was the expression of some sort
+of belief; it had candor, it had conviction, it had a vibrating note
+of revolt in its whisper, it had the appalling face of a glimpsed
+truth--the strange commingling of desire and hate. And it is not my own
+extremity I remember best--a vision of grayness without form filled
+with physical pain, and a careless contempt for the evanescence of all
+things--even of this pain itself. No! It is his extremity that I seem to
+have lived through. True, he had made that last stride, he had stepped
+over the edge, while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating
+foot. And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the
+wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that
+inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the
+invisible. Perhaps! I like to think my summing-up would not have been
+a word of careless contempt. Better his cry--much better. It was
+an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats, by
+abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions. But it was a victory!
+That is why I have remained loyal to Kurtz to the last, and even beyond,
+when a long time after I heard once more, not his own voice, but
+the echo of his magnificent eloquence thrown to me from a soul as
+translucently pure as a cliff of crystal.
+
+"No, they did not bury me, though there is a period of time which I
+remember mistily, with a shuddering wonder, like a passage through some
+inconceivable world that had no hope in it and no desire. I found myself
+back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying
+through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour
+their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their
+insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They
+were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretense,
+because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew.
+Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals
+going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was
+offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of
+a danger it is unable to comprehend. I had no particular desire to
+enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from
+laughing in their faces, so full of stupid importance. I dare say I was
+not very well at that time. I tottered about the streets--there were
+various affairs to settle--grinning bitterly at perfectly respectable
+persons. I admit my behavior was inexcusable, but then my temperature
+was seldom normal in these days. My dear aunt's endeavors to 'nurse up
+my strength' seemed altogether beside the mark. It was not my strength
+that wanted nursing, it was my imagination that wanted soothing. I kept
+the bundle of papers given me by Kurtz, not knowing exactly what to do
+with it. His mother had died lately, watched over, as I was told, by
+his Intended. A clean-shaved man, with an official manner and wearing
+gold-rimmed spectacles, called on me one day and made inquiries, at
+first circuitous, afterwards suavely pressing, about what he was pleased
+to denominate certain 'documents.' I was not surprised, because I had
+had two rows with the manager on the subject out there. I had refused
+to give up the smallest scrap out of that package, and I took the same
+attitude with the spectacled man. He became darkly menacing at last,
+and with much heat argued that the Company had the right to every bit
+of information about its 'territories.' And, said he, 'Mr. Kurtz's
+knowledge of unexplored regions must have been necessarily extensive
+and peculiar--owing to his great abilities and to the deplorable
+circumstances in which he had been placed: therefore'--I assured him Mr.
+Kurtz's knowledge, however extensive, did not bear upon the problems
+of commerce or administration. He invoked then the name of science. 'It
+would be an incalculable loss if,' &c., &c. I offered him the report on
+the 'Suppression of Savage Customs,' with the postscriptum torn off. He
+took it up eagerly, but ended by sniffing at it with an air of contempt.
+'This is not what we had a right to expect,' he remarked. 'Expect
+nothing else,' I said. 'There are only private letters.' He withdrew
+upon some threat of legal proceedings, and I saw him no more; but
+another fellow, calling himself Kurtz's cousin, appeared two days later,
+and was anxious to hear all the details about his dear relative's last
+moments. Incidentally he gave me to understand that Kurtz had been
+essentially a great musician. 'There was the making of an immense
+success,' said the man, who was an organist, I believe, with lank gray
+hair flowing over a greasy coat-collar. I had no reason to doubt
+his statement; and to this day I am unable to say what was Kurtz's
+profession, whether he ever had any--which was the greatest of his
+talents. I had taken him for a painter who wrote for the papers, or else
+for a journalist who could paint--but even the cousin (who took snuff
+during the interview) could not tell me what he had been--exactly. He
+was a universal genius--on that point I agreed with the old chap, who
+thereupon blew his nose noisily into a large cotton handkerchief and
+withdrew in senile agitation, bearing off some family letters and
+memoranda without importance. Ultimately a journalist anxious to know
+something of the fate of his 'dear colleague' turned up. This visitor
+informed me Kurtz's proper sphere ought to have been politics 'on the
+popular side.' He had furry straight eyebrows, bristly hair cropped
+short, an eye-glass on a broad ribbon, and, becoming expansive,
+confessed his opinion that Kurtz really couldn't write a bit--'but
+heavens! how that man could talk! He electrified large meetings. He had
+faith--don't you see?--he had the faith. He could get himself to believe
+anything--anything. He would have been a splendid leader of an extreme
+party.' 'What party?' I asked. 'Any party,' answered the other. 'He
+was an--an--extremist.' Did I not think so? I assented. Did I know, he
+asked, with a sudden flash of curiosity, 'what it was that had induced
+him to go out there?' 'Yes,' said I, and forthwith handed him the
+famous Report for publication, if he thought fit. He glanced through it
+hurriedly, mumbling all the time, judged 'it would do,' and took himself
+off with this plunder.
+
+"Thus I was left at last with a slim packet of letters and the girl's
+portrait. She struck me as beautiful--I mean she had a beautiful
+expression. I know that the sunlight can be made to lie too, yet one
+felt that no manipulation of light and pose could have conveyed the
+delicate shade of truthfulness upon those features. She seemed ready to
+listen without mental reservation, without suspicion, without a thought
+for herself. I concluded I would go and give her back her portrait
+and those letters myself. Curiosity? Yes; and also some other feeling
+perhaps. All that had been Kurtz's had passed out of my hands: his soul,
+his body, his station, his plans, his ivory, his career. There remained
+only his memory and his Intended--and I wanted to give that up too to
+the past, in a way,--to surrender personally all that remained of him
+with me to that oblivion which is the last word of our common fate. I
+don't defend myself. I had no clear perception of what it was I really
+wanted. Perhaps it was an impulse of unconscious loyalty, or the
+fulfillment of one of these ironic necessities that lurk in the facts of
+human existence. I don't know. I can't tell. But I went.
+
+"I thought his memory was like the other memories of the dead that
+accumulate in every man's life,--a vague impress on the brain of shadows
+that had fallen on it in their swift and final passage; but before the
+high and ponderous door, between the tall houses of a street as still
+and decorous as a well-kept alley in a cemetery, I had a vision of him
+on the stretcher, opening his mouth voraciously, as if to devour all the
+earth with all its mankind. He lived then before me; he lived as much
+as he had ever lived--a shadow insatiable of splendid appearances, of
+frightful realities; a shadow darker than the shadow of the night, and
+draped nobly in the folds of a gorgeous eloquence. The vision seemed to
+enter the house with me--the stretcher, the phantom-bearers, the wild
+crowd of obedient worshipers, the gloom of the forests, the glitter of
+the reach between the murky bends, the beat of the drum, regular and
+muffled like the beating of a heart--the heart of a conquering darkness.
+It was a moment of triumph for the wilderness, an invading and vengeful
+rush which, it seemed to me, I would have to keep back alone for the
+salvation of another soul. And the memory of what I had heard him say
+afar there, with the horned shapes stirring at my back, in the glow of
+fires, within the patient woods, those broken phrases came back to
+me, were heard again in their ominous and terrifying simplicity. I
+remembered his abject pleading, his abject threats, the colossal scale
+of his vile desires, the meanness, the torment, the tempestuous anguish
+of his soul. And later on I seemed to see his collected languid manner,
+when he said one day, 'This lot of ivory now is really mine. The Company
+did not pay for it. I collected it myself at a very great personal risk.
+I am afraid they will try to claim it as theirs though. H'm. It is a
+difficult case. What do you think I ought to do--resist? Eh? I want no
+more than justice.' . . . He wanted no more than justice--no more than
+justice. I rang the bell before a mahogany door on the first floor, and
+while I waited he seemed to stare at me out of the glassy panel--stare
+with that wide and immense stare embracing, condemning, loathing all the
+universe. I seemed to hear the whispered cry, 'The horror! The horror!'
+
+"The dusk was falling. I had to wait in a lofty drawing-room with three
+long windows from floor to ceiling that were like three luminous and
+bedraped columns. The bent gilt legs and backs of the furniture shone in
+indistinct curves. The tall marble fireplace had a cold and monumental
+whiteness. A grand piano stood massively in a corner, with dark gleams
+on the flat surfaces like a somber and polished sarcophagus. A high door
+opened--closed. I rose.
+
+"She came forward, all in black, with a pale head, floating towards
+me in the dusk. She was in mourning. It was more than a year since his
+death, more than a year since the news came; she seemed as though she
+would remember and mourn for ever. She took both my hands in hers and
+murmured, 'I had heard you were coming.' I noticed she was not very
+young--I mean not girlish. She had a mature capacity for fidelity, for
+belief, for suffering. The room seemed to have grown darker, as if all
+the sad light of the cloudy evening had taken refuge on her forehead.
+This fair hair, this pale visage, this pure brow, seemed surrounded by
+an ashy halo from which the dark eyes looked out at me. Their glance was
+guileless, profound, confident, and trustful. She carried her sorrowful
+head as though she were proud of that sorrow, as though she would say,
+'I--I alone know how to mourn for him as he deserves.' But while we were
+still shaking hands, such a look of awful desolation came upon her
+face that I perceived she was one of those creatures that are not the
+playthings of Time. For her he had died only yesterday. And, by Jove!
+the impression was so powerful that for me too he seemed to have died
+only yesterday--nay, this very minute. I saw her and him in the same
+instant of time--his death and her sorrow--I saw her sorrow in the very
+moment of his death. Do you understand? I saw them together--I heard
+them together. She had said, with a deep catch of the breath, 'I have
+survived;' while my strained ears seemed to hear distinctly, mingled
+with her tone of despairing regret, the summing-up whisper of his
+eternal condemnation. I asked myself what I was doing there, with a
+sensation of panic in my heart as though I had blundered into a place
+of cruel and absurd mysteries not fit for a human being to behold. She
+motioned me to a chair. We sat down. I laid the packet gently on the
+little table, and she put her hand over it. . . . 'You knew him well,'
+she murmured, after a moment of mourning silence.
+
+"'Intimacy grows quick out there,' I said. 'I knew him as well as it is
+possible for one man to know another.'
+
+"'And you admired him,' she said. 'It was impossible to know him and not
+to admire him. Was it?'
+
+"'He was a remarkable man,' I said, unsteadily. Then before the
+appealing fixity of her gaze, that seemed to watch for more words on my
+lips, I went on, 'It was impossible not to--'
+
+"'Love him,' she finished eagerly, silencing me into an appalled
+dumbness. 'How true! how true! But when you think that no one knew him
+so well as I! I had all his noble confidence. I knew him best.'
+
+"'You knew him best,' I repeated. And perhaps she did. But with every
+word spoken the room was growing darker, and only her forehead, smooth
+and white, remained illumined by the unextinguishable light of belief
+and love.
+
+"'You were his friend,' she went on. 'His friend,' she repeated, a
+little louder. 'You must have been, if he had given you this, and sent
+you to me. I feel I can speak to you--and oh! I must speak. I want
+you--you who have heard his last words--to know I have been worthy of
+him. . . . It is not pride. . . . Yes! I am proud to know I understood
+him better than anyone on earth--he told me so himself. And since his
+mother died I have had no one--no one--to--to--'
+
+"I listened. The darkness deepened. I was not even sure whether he had
+given me the right bundle. I rather suspect he wanted me to take care
+of another batch of his papers which, after his death, I saw the manager
+examining under the lamp. And the girl talked, easing her pain in the
+certitude of my sympathy; she talked as thirsty men drink. I had heard
+that her engagement with Kurtz had been disapproved by her people. He
+wasn't rich enough or something. And indeed I don't know whether he had
+not been a pauper all his life. He had given me some reason to infer
+that it was his impatience of comparative poverty that drove him out
+there.
+
+"'. . . Who was not his friend who had heard him speak once?' she was
+saying. 'He drew men towards him by what was best in them.' She looked
+at me with intensity. 'It is the gift of the great,' she went on, and
+the sound of her low voice seemed to have the accompaniment of all
+the other sounds, full of mystery, desolation, and sorrow, I had ever
+heard--the ripple of the river, the soughing of the trees swayed by the
+wind, the murmurs of wild crowds, the faint ring of incomprehensible
+words cried from afar, the whisper of a voice speaking from beyond the
+threshold of an eternal darkness. 'But you have heard him! You know!'
+she cried.
+
+"'Yes, I know,' I said with something like despair in my heart, but
+bowing my head before the faith that was in her, before that great and
+saving illusion that shone with an unearthly glow in the darkness, in
+the triumphant darkness from which I could not have defended her--from
+which I could not even defend myself.
+
+"'What a loss to me--to us!'--she corrected herself with beautiful
+generosity; then added in a murmur, 'To the world.' By the last gleams
+of twilight I could see the glitter of her eyes, full of tears--of tears
+that would not fall.
+
+"'I have been very happy--very fortunate--very proud,' she went on. 'Too
+fortunate. Too happy for a little while. And now I am unhappy for--for
+life.'
+
+"She stood up; her fair hair seemed to catch all the remaining light in
+a glimmer of gold. I rose too.
+
+"'And of all this,' she went on, mournfully, 'of all his promise, and
+of all his greatness, of his generous mind, of his noble heart, nothing
+remains--nothing but a memory. You and I--'
+
+"'We shall always remember him,' I said, hastily.
+
+"'No!' she cried. 'It is impossible that all this should be lost--that
+such a life should be sacrificed to leave nothing--but sorrow. You
+know what vast plans he had. I knew of them too--I could not perhaps
+understand,--but others knew of them. Something must remain. His words,
+at least, have not died.'
+
+"'His words will remain,' I said.
+
+"'And his example,' she whispered to herself. 'Men looked up to
+him,--his goodness shone in every act. His example--'
+
+"'True,' I said; 'his example too. Yes, his example. I forgot that.'
+
+"'But I do not. I cannot--I cannot believe--not yet. I cannot believe
+that I shall never see him again, that nobody will see him again, never,
+never, never.'
+
+"She put out her arms as if after a retreating figure, stretching them
+black and with clasped pale hands across the fading and narrow sheen of
+the window. Never see him! I saw him clearly enough then. I shall see
+this eloquent phantom as long as I live, and I shall see her too, a
+tragic and familiar Shade, resembling in this gesture another one,
+tragic also, and bedecked with powerless charms, stretching bare brown
+arms over the glitter of the infernal stream, the stream of darkness.
+She said suddenly very low, 'He died as he lived.'
+
+"'His end,' said I, with dull anger stirring in me, 'was in every way
+worthy of his life.'
+
+"'And I was not with him,' she murmured. My anger subsided before a
+feeling of infinite pity.
+
+"'Everything that could be done--' I mumbled.
+
+"'Ah, but I believed in him more than anyone on earth--more than his
+own mother, more than--himself. He needed me! Me! I would have treasured
+every sigh, every word, every sign, every glance.'
+
+"I felt like a chill grip on my chest. 'Don't,' I said, in a muffled
+voice.
+
+"'Forgive me. I--I--have mourned so long in silence--in silence. . . .
+You were with him--to the last? I think of his loneliness. Nobody near
+to understand him as I would have understood. Perhaps no one to
+hear. . . .'
+
+"'To the very end,' I said, shakily. 'I heard his very last words. . . .'
+I stopped in a fright.
+
+"'Repeat them,' she said in a heart-broken tone. 'I want--I
+want--something--something--to--to live with.'
+
+"I was on the point of crying at her, 'Don't you hear them?' The dusk
+was repeating them in a persistent whisper all around us, in a whisper
+that seemed to swell menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind.
+'The horror! The horror!'
+
+"'His last word--to live with,' she murmured. 'Don't you understand I
+loved him--I loved him--I loved him!'
+
+"I pulled myself together and spoke slowly.
+
+"'The last word he pronounced was--your name.'
+
+"I heard a light sigh, and then my heart stood still, stopped dead short
+by an exulting and terrible cry, by the cry of inconceivable triumph and
+of unspeakable pain. 'I knew it--I was sure!' . . . She knew. She was
+sure. I heard her weeping; she had hidden her face in her hands. It
+seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that
+the heavens would fall upon my head. But nothing happened. The heavens
+do not fall for such a trifle. Would they have fallen, I wonder, if I
+had rendered Kurtz that justice which was his due? Hadn't he said he
+wanted only justice? But I couldn't. I could not tell her. It would have
+been too dark--too dark altogether. . . ."
+
+Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a
+meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for a time. "We have lost the first of
+the ebb," said the Director, suddenly. I raised my head. The offing was
+barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading
+to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast
+sky--seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
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