HEART OF DARKNESS

by Joseph Conrad

 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 marsh 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 sombre

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, that 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 rotund 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 light-house, 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 colour

of lead, a sky the colour 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. Sand-banks, 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 pretence 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 like best 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 sombre

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 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,' etc. 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 sepulchre. 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 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 colours 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 centre. And the river was there--fascinating--deadly--like a snake.

Ough! A door opened, ya 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

inkstains 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-bye. Ah! Good-bye. _Adieu_. In the tropics one must

before everything keep calm.' . . . He lifted a warning forefinger. . . .

'_Du calme, du calme_.'

"One thing more remained to do--say good-bye 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-half-penny 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 labourer 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 has 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 imposter. 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

centre of a continent, I were about to set off for the centre 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 greyish-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

pinheads 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

back-cloth. 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 sombreness 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 six-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

six-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 upcountry?' 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 boulders, 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 waggled 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 the sea. All their meagre

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 the 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 the 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 clean 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 book-keeping 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, 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.' Thus 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 set 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 invalid agent from

upcountry) 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

deck--' 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 finished 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 the

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 travelling 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

enclosed 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 moustaches, 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 axe. 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 rumours 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 dumfounded 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 can I tell?' I said. 'I haven'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 verandah)

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 moustaches 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, 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.

Anyway, 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 back-biting 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 pretence 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

only 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 sombre--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 an empty 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. Every one 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. Today 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 moustaches, 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 riverside, 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 that 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 sombre

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 flavour 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 pretence 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 ya

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 clue 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 long 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 icthyosaurus 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 donkey; 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

instalments 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 ywas 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 neighbourhood, 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 dugout 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 dugout,

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 rumours.' 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 best.' 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 centre 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!' 'Hm'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 dishonouring 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 sand-banks 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 for 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 lookout 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 towards 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 wood-cutters slept, their fires burned low; the snapping of a twig

would make you start. Were 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 travelling 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 ywas 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, valour, 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 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

wood-pile. 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 Towser, 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 pencilled 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 riverside. 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 any one 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 clamour, 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 sidespring

boots, and pink pyjamas tucked into his socks. Two others remained

open-mouthed a while 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 be all 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-defence. 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 riverside 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 honourable 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 colour, 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 honour?

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 sombre 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, dishonour, 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 clamour that had swept by us on the river-bank, behind the blind

whiteness of the fog.

"Two pilgrims were quarrelling 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 we 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 lookout. 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 riverside 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 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 lookout? 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 sand-bank, or

rather of a chain of shallow patches stretching down the middle of the

river. They were discoloured, 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 teakwood 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 on 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 landside. 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 colour. 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 sight 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 lustre. 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 questions 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 sombre,

brooding, and menacing expression. The lustre 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 travelled 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 preeminently, 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 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 favourite. 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

favour 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

neighbours 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 untrammelled 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 neighbour 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 honoured 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 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,' etc., etc. 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

honour; 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

doorstep; 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 avenged. '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 riverside 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 enclosure 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 waterside 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 manoeuvred 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 the

front, patches on elbows, on knees; coloured binding around 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 wind-swept 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 . . . honour . . . 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 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 favourite 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 parti-coloured 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

appearances 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 bepatched 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 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 ascendancy 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 that 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 downhill 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

splendour, with a murky and overshadowed 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, halfway 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 dishonouring

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 head-dresses 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 have 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 honour 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 heavy glance, said very quietly, 'he _was_,' and turned

his back on me. My hour of favour 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 lip, 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

sandalwise 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,' etc., etc. 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!' 'Good-bye,' 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 any one 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 vapour 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 vigour 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 fiendlike 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 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 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 responses 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 colourless 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 some one 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 sombre 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 disfavour. 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 mould

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 sombre 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 greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around,

without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great

desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly

atmosphere of tepid scepticism, 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 candour, 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 greyness 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 pretence,

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 daresay 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 behaviour was inexcusable, but then my temperature

was seldom normal in these days. My dear aunt's endeavours 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,' etc., etc. 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 grey

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 eyeglass 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

fulfilment of one of those 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 worshippers, 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 sombre 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 forever. 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 quickly 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 inextinguishable 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 any one 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 the 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

back 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 any one 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 murmured 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 insisted. '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 sombre under an overcast

sky--seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.

End of Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad