Heart of Darkness

Conrad, Joseph

Published: 1902

Categorie(s): Fiction, Literary

Source: University of Virginia

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About Conrad:

Joseph Conrad (born Teodor Józef Konrad Korzeniowski, 3

December 1857 – 3 August 1924) was a Polish-born novelist.

Some of his works have been labelled romantic: Conrad's sup-

posed "romanticism" is heavily imbued with irony and a fine sense of man's capacity for self-deception. Many critics regard

Conrad as an important forerunner of Modernist literature.

Conrad's narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influ-

enced many writers, including Ernest Hemingway, D.H.

Lawrence, Graham Greene, Joseph Heller and Jerzy Kosiński,

as well as inspiring such films as Apocalypse Now (which was

drawn from Conrad's Heart of Darkness). Source: Wikipedia

Also available on Feedbooks for Conrad:

• Lord Jim (1900)

• The Secret Agent (1907)

• A Personal Record (1912)

• Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (1904)

• The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (1897)

• The Duel (1908)

• An Outpost of Progress (1896)

• The Lagoon (1897)

• The Informer (1906)

• Under Western Eyes (1911)

Copyright: This work is available for countries where copy-

right is Life+70 and in the USA.

Note: This book is brought to you by Feedbooks

http://www.feedbooks.com

Strictly for personal use, do not use this file for commercial

purposes.

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1

Chapter

The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flut-

ter 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 be-

ginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and

the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the lumin-

ous 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 con-

densed 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 sea-

man 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 toler-

ant of each other’s yarns—and even convictions. The Law-

yer—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. Mar-

low 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,

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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. After-

wards there was silence on board the yacht. For some reason

or other we did not begin that game of dominoes. We felt med-

itative, and fit for nothing but placid staring. The day was end-

ing in a serenity of still and exquisite brilliance. The water

shone pacifically; the sky, without a speck, was a benign im-

mensity 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 ap-

proach 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 utter-

most 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, “fol-

lowed the sea” with reverence and affection, than to evoke the

great spirit of the past upon the lower reaches of the Thames.

The tidal current runs to and fro in its unceasing service,

crowded with memories of men and ships it had borne to the

rest of home or to the battles of the sea. It had known and

served all the men of whom the nation is proud, from Sir Fran-

cis Drake to Sir John Franklin, knights all, titled and un-

titled—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,

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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, admir-

als, the dark “interlopers” of the Eastern trade, and the com-

missioned “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 great-

ness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of

an unknown earth! … The dreams of men, the seed of common-

wealths, 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 disdain-

ful ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman un-

less 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 un-

fold 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

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propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, envelop-ing 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 com-

mander of a fine—what d’ye call ’em?—trireme in the Mediter-

ranean, ordered suddenly to the north; run overland across the

Gauls in a hurry; put in charge of one of these craft the legion-

aries—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 go-

ing 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 milit-

ary 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, ex-

cept 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

6

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 in-

comprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascina-

tion, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the ab-

omination—you know, imagine the growing regrets, the long-

ing 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 rob-

bery 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, cross-

ing each other—then separating slowly or hastily. The traffic of

the great city went on in the deepening night upon the sleep-

less 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 fel-

lows 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.

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“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 culminat-

ing 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 re-

member. Well, I haven’t been there yet, and shall not try now.

The glamour’s off. Other places were scattered about the hemi-

spheres. 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 im-

mense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest

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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 wa-

ter—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, be-

cause 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 wo-

men. 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 de-

termined 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 cap-

tains 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 re-

cover what was left of the body, that I heard the original quar-

rel 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

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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 supernatur-

al 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, wo-

men, and children, through the bush, and they had never re-

turned. 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 employ-

ers, and sign the contract. In a very few hours I arrived in a

city that always makes me think of a whited sepulchre. Preju-

dice no doubt. I had no difficulty in finding the Company’s of-

fices. 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

10

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 get-

ting out of her way, as you would for a somnambulist, stood

still, and looked up. Her dress was as plain as an umbrella–cov-

er, 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, be-

cause 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 in-

to 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 wait-

ing–room with the compassionate secretary, who, full of desol-

ation 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 at-

mosphere. It was just as though I had been let into some con-

spiracy—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,

11

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 introdu-

cing, introducing continuously to the unknown, the other scru-

tinizing 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,’ as-

sured 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 bil-

lowy, 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 senten-

tiously, 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 un-

shaven 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,

12

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 an-

other 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. ADIEU.’

“One thing more remained to do—say good–bye to my excel-

lent 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 draw-

ing–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 ex-

ceptional and gifted creature—a piece of good fortune for the

Company—a man you don’t get hold of every day. Good heav-

ens! 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

13

feet. She talked about ‘weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways,’ till, upon my word, she made me quite un-comfortable. 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 af-

fair. 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 pur-

pose of landing soldiers and custom–house officers. I watched

the coast. Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like think-

ing about an enigma. There it is before you— smiling, frown-

ing, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute

with an air of whispering, ‘Come and find out.’ This one was al-

most 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 un-

touched expanse of their background. We pounded along,

14

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—trad-

ing 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 fel-

lows. You could see from afar the white of their eyeballs

glistening. They shouted, sang; their bodies streamed with per-

spiration; 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 re-

member, 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 there-

abouts. 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 pro-

jectile would give a feeble screech—and nothing happened.

Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in the

15

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 en-

emies!—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 at-

mosphere 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 wa-

ters, 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 particular-

ized 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 be-

comes of that kind when it goes upcountry?’ I said to him I ex-

pected 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 him-

self 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.’

16

“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 sud-

den recrudescence of glare. ‘There’s your Company’s station,’

said the Swede, pointing to three wooden barrack–like struc-

tures 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 det-

onation 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 re-

port 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 omin-

ous 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

17

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, car-

rying 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 be-

come 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 warn-

ing. 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 di-

vine. 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 drain-

age–pipes for the settlement had been tumbled in there. There

wasn’t one that was not broken. It was a wanton smash–up. At

18

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 rap-

ids were near, and an uninterrupted, uniform, headlong, rush-

ing 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, aban-

donment, and despair. Another mine on the cliff went off, fol-

lowed 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, ly-

ing confusedly in the greenish gloom. Brought from all the re-

cesses 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 un-

der 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 move-

ment 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

19

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 mas-

sacre 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 wonder-

fully 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 indissol-

ubly connected with the memories of that time. Moreover, I re-

spected 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 charac-

ter. 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 accom-

plished 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

20

arrived and departed; a stream of manufactured goods, rub-bishy 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 some-

times 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 fault-

less 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 cler-

ical errors in this climate.’

“One day he remarked, without lifting his head, ‘In the interi-

or 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 ques-

tions elicited from him that Mr. Kurtz was at present in charge

of a trading–post, a very important one, in the true ivory–coun-

try, 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 ‘giv-

ing 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

21

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 sat-

isfactory. 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 in-

sensible; 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, every-

where; 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 fear-

ful 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 there-

abouts would get empty very soon. Only here the dwellings

were gone, too. Still I passed through several abandoned vil-

lages. 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 per-

haps with as profound a meaning as the sound of bells in a

22

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 per-

manent 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 ham-

mock 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 even-

ing, 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 sci-

ence 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 bor-

der of smelly mud on one side, and on the three others en-

closed 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, ex-

citable chap with black moustaches, informed me with great

volubility and many digressions, as soon as I told him who I

23

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 agita-

tion, ‘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 nat-

ural. 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 man-

ager 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 cer-

tainly 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 inscrut-

able. 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 uneasi-

ness. That was it! Uneasiness. Not a definite mistrust—just un-

easiness—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

24

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. Per-

haps 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 spe-

cial 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 im-

portant station was in jeopardy, and its chief, Mr. Kurtz, was

ill. Hoped it was not true. Mr. Kurtz was … I felt weary and ir-

ritable. 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, as-

suring me Mr. Kurtz was the best agent he had, an exceptional

25

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, ex-

claimed, ‘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. Be-

ing 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 fu-

tile. ‘Some months,’ he said. ‘Well, let us say three months be-

fore 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 nev-

er 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 cut-

ting 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

26

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 try-

ing 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 pro-

nounced, 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 in-

credible,’ 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–off-

ish 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 sup-

posed 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

27

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 in-

triguing 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 philanthrop-

ic pretence of the whole concern, as their talk, as their govern-

ment, 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 chat-

ted 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—put-

ting 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 curi-

ous 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

28

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 produ-

cing an unexpected effect upon that young man. I nearly burst

into a laugh. ‘Do you read the Company’s confidential corres-

pondence?’ 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 indefatig-

able 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 com-

panion, 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

29

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 moon-

light, 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 it-

self 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 assist-

ant–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 still-

ness 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

30

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 for-

get. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rot-

ten 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 pil-

grims. 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 un-

derstand. 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 strug-

gling 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

31

word, that would give me the clue to the faint uneasiness inspired by this narrative that seemed to shape itself without hu-

man 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—intel-

ligent men.’ He did not make bricks—why, there was a physical

impossibility in the way—as I was well aware; and if he did sec-

retarial 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 handker-

chiefs. 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 unre-

sponsive 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

32

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 en-

ergy 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 expen-

ded enough hard work on her to make me love her. No influen-

tial 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 imper-

fect 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

33

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 riv-

ets!’ 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 pil-

grims 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 si-

lence driven away by the stamping of our feet flowed back

again from the recesses of the land. The great wall of vegeta-

tion, 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

34

and left to the impressed pilgrims. A quarrelsome band of foot-sore 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 instal-

ments 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 wilder-

ness 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 Ex-

pedition, and I believe they were sworn to secrecy. Their talk,

however, was the talk of sordid buccaneers: it was reckless

without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without

courage; there was not an atom of foresight or of serious inten-

tion 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 enter-

prise I don’t know; but the uncle of our manager was leader of

that lot.

“In exterior he resembled a butcher in a poor neighbour-

hood, 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 neph-

ew. 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 capa-

city for that kind of folly is more limited than you would sup-

pose. 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.”

35

2

Chapter

“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 ab-

surd 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 as-

sistant 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.

36

‘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 re-

turn himself, the station being by that time bare of goods and

stores, but after coming three hundred miles, had suddenly de-

cided 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 wil-

derness, 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, un-

less a species of wandering trader—a pestilential fellow, snap-

ping ivory from the natives.’ Who was it they were talking

about now? I gathered in snatches that this was some man sup-

posed 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. ‘Cer-

tainly,’ 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.

37

‘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.” Con-

ceive 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 relat-

ive 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 dis-

play 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 be-

lieve—then pretending not to know anything of my existence,

turned back to the station. The sun was low; and leaning for-

ward side by side, they seemed to be tugging painfully uphill

their two ridiculous shadows of unequal length, that trailed be-

hind 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.

38

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 com-

paratively. 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, slug-

gish. 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 al-

ligators sunned themselves side by side. The broadening wa-

ters 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

39

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 steam-

boat on my first trip. It’s a wonder to me yet. Imagine a blind-

folded 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 sup-

posed 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 pil-

grims 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, im-

mense, 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

40

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 re-

turn. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of dark-

ness. 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 in-

heritance, 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 clap-

ping. 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, wel-

coming us—who could tell? We were cut off from the compre-

hension 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 under-

stand because we were too far and could not remember be-

cause 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

41

and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the

thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate

uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man

enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just

the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that

noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which

you—you so remote from the night of first ages—could compre-

hend. And why not? The mind of man is capable of any-

thing—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. Prin-

ciples 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 band-

ages 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 speci-

men; 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 wa-

ter–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

42

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 transpar-

ent 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 flat-

ways through his lower lip), while the wooded banks slipped

past us slowly, the short noise was left behind, the intermin-

able 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 unre-

cognizable 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 de-

ciphered it said: ‘Wood for you. Hurry up. Approach cau-

tiously.’ 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 dis-

mantled; 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

43

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 de-

scription 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 as-

sumed 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 mo-

ment. It was like watching the last flickers of a life. But still we 44

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 dis-

played 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 cau-

tiously 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 un-

reasonably, 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 cut-

ting. 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

45

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 im-

mense 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 tu-

multuous 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 pyja-

mas tucked into his socks. Two others remained open–mouthed

a while minute, then dashed into the little cabin, to rush out in-

continently 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, per-

haps two feet broad, around her—and that was all. The rest of

the world was nowhere, as far as our eyes and ears were con-

cerned. 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

46

we, though their homes were only eight hundred miles away.

The whites, of course greatly discomposed, had besides a curi-

ous 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 hullaba-

loo, thrown a considerable quantity of it overboard. It looked

like a high–handed proceeding; but it was really a case of legit-

imate self–defence. You can’t breathe dead hippo waking,

sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precari-

ous 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 oc-

casional old he–goat thrown in, didn’t want to stop the steamer

47

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 seri-

ous 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 capa-

city 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 in-

terest—not because it occurred to me I might be eaten by them

before very long, though I own to you that just then I per-

ceived—in a new light, as it were—how unwholesome the pil-

grims looked, and I hoped, yes, I positively hoped, that my as-

pect 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 prelim-inary 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 supersti-

tion, 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 super-

stition, 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

48

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 re-

straint. 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 ap-

proach to this Kurtz grubbing for ivory in the wretched bush

was beset by as many dangers as though he had been an en-

chanted princess sleeping in a fabulous castle. ‘Will they

49

attack, do you think?’ asked the manager, in a confidential tone.

“I did not think they would attack, for several obvious reas-

ons. 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 im-

penetrable—and yet eyes were in it, eyes that had seen us. The

riverside bushes were certainly very thick; but the under-

growth behind was evidently penetrable. However, during the

short lift I had seen no canoes anywhere in the reach—cer-

tainly not abreast of the steamer. But what made the idea of at-

tack 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 viol-

ence—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 abso-

lutely 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 lif-

ted, 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

50

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 projec-

ted rigidly over the stream. It was then well on in the after-

noon, 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

51

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 sud-

denly, 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 whizz-

ing 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

52

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 open-

ing, 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 some-

where 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 pi-

lot–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. So-

mething 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

53

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, gleam-

ing 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 tremu-

lous 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 mo-

ment 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, glar-

ing at the wounded man.

“We two whites stood over him, and his lustrous and inquir-

ing 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 mov-

ing 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 inconeivably

sombre, brooding, and menacing expression. The lustre of in-

quiring 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 mor-

bidly anxious to change my shoes and socks. ‘He is dead,’ mur-

mured 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.’

54

“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 sub-

stance. I couldn’t have been more disgusted if I had travelled

all this way for the sole purpose of talking with Mr. Kurtz. Talk-

ing 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 ima-

gined 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 expres-

sion, the bewildering, the illuminating, the most exalted and

the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light, or the de-

ceitful 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 van-

ished—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, ab-

surd. 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 down-

ward 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.

55

“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 police-

man round another, excellent appetites, and temperature nor-

mal—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, sud-

denly. “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 beau-

tiful 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 some-

times, but this—ah—specimen, was impressively bald. The wil-

derness 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

56

fossil than I am; but they call it fossil when it is dug up. It appears these niggers do bury the tusks sometimes—but evid-

ently 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 wilder-

ness 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 im-

possible—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 whis-

pering 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 dark-

ness. 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

57

Jove!—breathe dead hippo, so to speak, and not be contamin-ated. 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 al-

together. 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 Interna-

tional Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs had in-

trusted him with the making of a report, for its future guid-

ance. 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 de-

velopment 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 prac-

tically unbounded,’ etc., etc. From that point he soared and

took me with him. The peroration was magnificent, though dif-

ficult to remember, you know. It gave me the notion of an exot-

ic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made me

tingle with enthusiasm. This was the unbounded power of elo-

quence—of words—of burning noble words. There were no

practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases, un-

less a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled

58

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 se-

rene sky: ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’ The curious part was

that he had apparently forgotten all about that valuable post-

scriptum, because, later on, when he in a sense came to him-

self, 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 in-

disputable right to lay it, if I choose, for an everlasting rest in

the dust–bin of progress, amongst all the sweepings and, figur-

atively 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 hon-

our; 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 pi-

lot–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 in-

strument. 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

59

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 desper-

ately. Oh! he was heavy, heavy; heavier than any man on earth,

I should imagine. Then without more ado I tipped him over-

board. 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 con-

gregated 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. Em-

balm it, maybe. But I had also heard another, and a very omin-

ous, murmur on the deck below. My friends the wood–cutters

were likewise scandalized, and with a better show of reas-

on—though I admit that the reason itself was quite inadmiss-

ible. Oh, quite! I had made up my mind that if my late helms-

man 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 pos-

sibly 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 go-

ing 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 glori-

ous slaughter of them in the bush. Eh? What do you think?

Say?’ He positively danced, the bloodthirsty little gingery beg-

gar. And he had nearly fainted when he saw the wounded man!

I could not help saying, ‘You made a glorious lot of smoke, any-

how.’ 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 re-

treat, I maintained—and I was right—was caused by the

60

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 de-

caying 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 ap-

parently, for near the house half–a–dozen slim posts remained

in a row, roughly trimmed, and with their upper ends ornamen-

ted with round carved balls. The rails, or whatever there had

been between, had disappeared. Of course the forest surroun-

ded all that. The river–bank was clear, and on the waterside I

saw a white man under a hat like a cart–wheel beckoning per-

sistently with his whole arm. Examining the edge of the forest

above and below, I was almost certain I could see move-

ments—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 man-

oeuvred 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 hol-

land 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

61

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 be-

coming 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 pi-

lot–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 … de-

light … 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?”

62

“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.”

63

3

Chapter

“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 improb-

able, inexplicable, and altogether bewildering. He was an insol-

uble problem. It was inconceivable how he had existed, how he

had succeeded in getting so far, how he had managed to re-

main—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 fu-

tile wanderings. For months—for years—his life hadn’t been

worth a day’s purchase; and there he was gallantly, thought-

lessly alive, to all appearances indestructible solely by the vir-

tue of his few years and of his unreflecting audacity. I was se-

duced 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 ad-

venture 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.

64

“They had come together unavoidably, like two ships be-calmed near each other, and lay rubbing sides at last. I sup-

pose 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 hu-

man 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 al-

luded 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!—some-

times.’ ‘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 danger-

ous to inquire too much—but mostly his expeditions had been

for ivory. ‘But he had no goods to trade with by that time,’ I ob-

jected. ‘There’s a good lot of cartridges left even yet,’ he

answered, looking away. ‘To speak plainly, he raided the coun-

try,’ 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 ex-

traordinary 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

65

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, be-

cause 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, some-

times 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 re-

main; 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 bin-

oculars while we talked, and was looking at the shore, sweep-

ing 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 sug-

gested 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 pa-

tient expectation, of unapproachable silence. The Russian was

66

explaining to me that it was only lately that Mr. Kurtz had come down to the river, bringing along with him all the fight-ing 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 win-

dow–holes, no two of the same size; all this brought within

reach of my hand, as it were. And then I made a brusque move-

ment, 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 orna-

mentation, 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 disturb-

ing—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 eye-

lids—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

67

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 con-

ception 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 in-

accessible 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 ascend-

ancy 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 ceremon-

ies used when approaching Mr. Kurtz,’ I shouted. Curious, this

feeling that came over me that such details would be more in-

tolerable 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 light-

less region of subtle horrors, where pure, uncomplicated sav-

agery 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!

68

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 any-

body. How can you compare me to … ?’ His feelings were too

much for speech, and suddenly he broke down. ‘I don’t under-

stand,’ 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 ap-

peared, 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

69

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 mov-

ing, 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–car-

bine—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.

70

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—facti-

tious 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 fol-

lowed the direction of his glance.

“Dark human shapes could be made out in the distance, flit-

ting 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 leg-

gings 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 pas-

sionate 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

71

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 fel-

low by my side growled. The pilgrims murmured at my back.

She looked at us all as if her life had depended upon the un-

swerving 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, point-

ing 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 cur-

tain: ‘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, cau-

tiously—that’s my principle. We must be cautious yet. The

72

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 brick-

maker, will make a readable report for you.’ He appeared con-

founded for a moment. It seemed to me I had never breathed

an atmosphere so vile, and I turned mentally to Kurtz for re-

lief—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 mum-

bling and stammering something about ‘brother sea-

man—couldn’t conceal—knowledge of matters that would af-

fect 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

73

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 reputa-

tion—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 any-

body here—’ I promised a complete discretion with great grav-

ity. ‘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 en-

larged my mind!’ ‘Good–bye,’ said I. He shook hands and

74

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 pur-

pose, 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 monoton-

ous 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 cas-

ually 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 im-

possible. The fact is I was completely unnerved by a sheer

blank fright, pure abstract terror, unconnected with any dis-

tinct 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 unex-

pectedly. 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.

75

“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 imbe-

cile thoughts. The knitting old woman with the cat obtruded

herself upon my memory as a most improper person to be sit-

ting 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 confoun-

ded 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 star-

light, 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 clev-

erly; but when actually confronting him I seemed to come to

76

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 un-

derstand—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 unlaw-

ful 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,

77

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 in-

credible 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 suggest-

iveness of words heard in dreams, of phrases spoken in night-

mares. 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 unavoid-

able noise. But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilder-

ness, 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 sin-

cerity. 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 pres-

ence 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 splash-

ing, thumping, fierce river–demon beating the water with its

terrible tail and breathing black smoke into the air. In front of

78

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 shut-

ter. 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, ap-

pear on his colourless lips that a moment after twitched con-

vulsively. ‘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 bod-

ies. ‘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

79

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 ‘un-

sound 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 night-

mares 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 ob-

sequiously 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 frequen-

ted 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 recog-

nition 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 multi-

tude of secular trees looking patiently after this grimy frag-

ment 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

80

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 re-

pairs 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 ly-

ing 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 abom-

inate, 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 wait-

ing 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 fea-

tures 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 in-

tense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every

detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that su-

preme 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:

81

“‘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 noth-

ing 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 ad-

versary. 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 remark-

able man. He had something to say. He said it. Since I had

82

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 remark-

able man. After all, this was the expression of some sort of be-

lief; 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 per-

haps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom,

and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that in-

appreciable moment of time in which we step over the

threshold of the invisible. Perhaps! I like to think my sum-

ming–up would not have been a word of careless contempt.

Better his cry—much better. It was an affirmation, a moral vic-

tory 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 re-

senting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch

a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cook-

ery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignific-

ant 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

83

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 dareway 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 in-

excusable, 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 in-

quiries, 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 ne-

cessarily 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 com-

merce 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 post-

scriptum 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, call-

ing himself Kurtz’s cousin, appeared two days later, and was

anxious to hear all the details about his dear relative’s last mo-

ments. Incidentally he gave me to understand that Kurtz had

84

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 un-

able 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 in-

terview) 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 handker-

chief and withdrew in senile agitation, bearing off some family

letters and memoranda without importance. Ultimately a journ-

alist anxious to know something of the fate of his ‘dear col-

league’ turned up. This visitor informed me Kurtz’s proper

sphere ought to have been politics ‘on the popular side.’ He

had furry straight eyebrows, bristly hair cropped short, an eye-

glass on a broad ribbon, and, becoming expansive, confessed

his opinion that Kurtz really couldn’t write a bit—‘but heavens!

how that man could talk. He electrified large meetings. He had

faith—don’t you see?—he had the faith. He could get himself to

believe anything—anything. He would have been a splendid

leader of an extreme party.’ ‘What party?’ I asked. ‘Any party,’

answered the other. ‘He was an—an—extremist.’ Did I not

think so? I assented. Did I know, he asked, with a sudden flash

of curiosity, ‘what it was that had induced him to go out there?’

‘Yes,’ said I, and forthwith handed him the famous Report for

publication, if he thought fit. He glanced through it hurriedly,

mumbling all the time, judged ‘it would do,’ and took himself

off with this plunder.

“Thus I was left at last with a slim packet of letters and the

girl’s portrait. She struck me as beautiful—I mean she had a

beautiful expression. I know that the sunlight ycan 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 re-

servation, 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 per-

haps. All that had been Kurtz’s had passed out of my hands: his

85

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 exist-

ence. 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 fi-

nal 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 appear-

ances, of frightful realities; a shadow darker than the shadow

of the night, and draped nobly in the folds of a gorgeous elo-

quence. 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 in-

vading 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 co-

lossal 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 col-

lected 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

86

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 embra-

cing, 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 to-

wards 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 be-

lief, 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, confid-

ent, 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 yester-

day. 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 dis-

tinctly, mingled with her tone of despairing regret, the

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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 ab-

surd mysteries not fit for a human being to behold. She mo-

tioned 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 ap-

palled dumbness. ‘How true! how true! But when you think

that no one knew him so well as I! I had all his noble confid-

ence. 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 re-

peated, 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 sym-

pathy; she talked as thirsty men drink. I had heard that her en-

gagement 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

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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 mys-

tery, 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 de-

fend 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 remain-

ing 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—’

89

“‘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, stretch-

ing 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 be-

decked 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 si-

lence… . You were with him—to the last? I think of his loneli-

ness. Nobody near to understand him as I would have under-

stood. 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 under-

stand I loved him—I loved him—I loved him!’

“I pulled myself together and spoke slowly.

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“‘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 incon-

ceivable 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.

THE END

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