автордың кітабын онлайн тегін оқу  Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad

I

The Nel­lie, a cruis­ing yawl, swung to her an­chor with­out a flut­ter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and be­ing bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide.

The sea-reach of the Thames stretched be­fore us like the be­gin­ning of an in­ter­minable wa­ter­way. In the off­ing the sea and the sky were welded to­gether with­out a joint, and in the lu­mi­nous space the tanned sails of the barges drift­ing up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clus­ters of can­vas sharply peaked, with gleams of var­nished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in van­ish­ing flat­ness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and far­ther back still seemed con­densed into a mourn­ful gloom, brood­ing mo­tion­less over the big­gest, and the great­est, town on earth.

The Direc­tor of Com­pa­nies was our cap­tain and our host. We four af­fec­tion­ately watched his back as he stood in the bows look­ing to sea­ward. On the whole river there was noth­ing that looked half so nau­ti­cal. He re­sem­bled a pi­lot, which to a sea­man is trust­wor­thi­ness per­son­i­fied. It was dif­fi­cult to re­al­ize his work was not out there in the lu­mi­nous es­tu­ary, but be­hind him, within the brood­ing gloom.

Between us there was, as I have al­ready said some­where, the bond of the sea. Be­sides hold­ing our hearts to­gether through long pe­ri­ods of sep­a­ra­tion, it had the ef­fect of mak­ing us tol­er­ant of each other’s yarns—and even con­vic­tions. The Lawyer—the best of old fel­lows—had, be­cause of his many years and many virtues, the only cush­ion on deck, and was ly­ing on the only rug. The Ac­coun­tant had brought out al­ready a box of domi­noes, and was toy­ing ar­chi­tec­turally with the bones. Mar­low sat cross-legged right aft, lean­ing against the mizzen­mast. He had sunken cheeks, a yel­low com­plex­ion, a straight back, an as­cetic as­pect, and, with his arms dropped, the palms of hands out­wards, re­sem­bled an idol. The di­rec­tor, sat­is­fied the an­chor had good hold, made his way aft and sat down amongst us. We ex­changed a few words lazily. After­wards there was si­lence on board the yacht. For some rea­son or other we did not be­gin that game of domi­noes. We felt med­i­ta­tive, and fit for noth­ing but placid star­ing. The day was end­ing in a seren­ity of still and ex­quis­ite bril­liance. The wa­ter shone pacif­i­cally; the sky, with­out a speck, was a be­nign im­men­sity of un­stained light; the very mist on the Es­sex marsh was like a gauzy and ra­di­ant fab­ric, hung from the wooded rises in­land, and drap­ing the low shores in di­aphanous folds. Only the gloom to the west, brood­ing over the up­per reaches, be­came more som­bre ev­ery minute, as if an­gered by the ap­proach of the sun.

And at last, in its curved and im­per­cep­ti­ble fall, the sun sank low, and from glow­ing white changed to a dull red with­out rays and with­out heat, as if about to go out sud­denly, stricken to death by the touch of that gloom brood­ing over a crowd of men.

Forth­with a change came over the wa­ters, and the seren­ity be­came less bril­liant but more pro­found. The old river in its broad reach rested un­ruf­fled at the de­cline of day, af­ter ages of good ser­vice done to the race that peo­pled its banks, spread out in the tran­quil dig­nity of a wa­ter­way lead­ing to the ut­ter­most ends of the earth. We looked at the ven­er­a­ble stream not in the vivid flush of a short day that comes and de­parts for­ever, but in the au­gust light of abid­ing mem­o­ries. And in­deed noth­ing is eas­ier for a man who has, as the phrase goes, “fol­lowed the sea” with rev­er­ence and af­fec­tion, that to evoke the great spirit of the past upon the lower reaches of the Thames. The tidal cur­rent runs to and fro in its un­ceas­ing ser­vice, crowded with mem­o­ries of men and ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the bat­tles of the sea. It had known and served all the men of whom the na­tion is proud, from Sir Fran­cis Drake to Sir John Franklin, knights all, ti­tled and un­ti­tled—the great knights-er­rant of the sea. It had borne all the ships whose names are like jew­els flash­ing in the night of time, from the Golden Hind re­turn­ing with her ro­tund flanks full of trea­sure, to be vis­ited by the Queen’s High­ness and thus pass out of the gi­gan­tic tale, to the Ere­bus and Ter­ror, bound on other con­quests—and that never re­turned. It had known the ships and the men. They had sailed from Dept­ford, from Green­wich, from Erith—the ad­ven­tur­ers and the set­tlers; kings’ ships and the ships of men on ’Change; cap­tains, ad­mi­rals, the dark “in­ter­lop­ers” of the Eastern trade, and the com­mis­sioned “gen­er­als” of East In­dia fleets. Hun­ters for gold or pur­suers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bear­ing the sword, and of­ten the torch, mes­sen­gers of the might within the land, bear­ers of a spark from the sa­cred fire. What great­ness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mys­tery of an un­known earth! … The dreams of men, the seed of com­mon­wealths, the germs of em­pires.

The sun set; the dusk fell on the stream, and lights be­gan to ap­pear along the shore. The Chap­man light­house, a three-legged thing erect on a mud­flat, shone strongly. Lights of ships moved in the fair­way—a great stir of lights go­ing up and go­ing down. And far­ther west on the up­per reaches the place of the mon­strous town was still marked omi­nously on the sky, a brood­ing gloom in sun­shine, a lurid glare un­der the stars.

“And this also,” said Mar­low sud­denly, “has been one of the dark places of the earth.”

He was the only man of us who still “fol­lowed the sea.” The worst that could be said of him was that he did not rep­re­sent his class. He was a sea­man, but he was a wan­derer, too, while most sea­men lead, if one may so ex­press it, a seden­tary life. Their minds are of the stay-at-home or­der, and their home is al­ways with them—the ship; and so is their coun­try—the sea. One ship is very much like an­other, and the sea is al­ways the same. In the im­mutabil­ity of their sur­round­ings the for­eign shores, the for­eign faces, the chang­ing im­men­sity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mys­tery but by a slightly dis­dain­ful ig­no­rance; for there is noth­ing mys­te­ri­ous to a sea­man un­less it be the sea it­self, which is the mis­tress of his ex­is­tence and as in­scrutable as Destiny. For the rest, af­ter his hours of work, a ca­sual stroll or a ca­sual spree on shore suf­fices to un­fold for him the se­cret of a whole con­ti­nent, and gen­er­ally he finds the se­cret not worth know­ing. The yarns of sea­men have a di­rect sim­plic­ity, the whole mean­ing of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Mar­low was not typ­i­cal (if his propen­sity to spin yarns be ex­cepted), and to him the mean­ing of an episode was not in­side like a ker­nel but out­side, en­velop­ing the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the like­ness of one of these misty ha­los that some­times are made vis­i­ble by the spec­tral il­lu­mi­na­tion of moon­shine.

His re­mark did not seem at all sur­pris­ing. It was just like Mar­low. It was ac­cepted in si­lence. No one took the trou­ble to grunt even; and presently he said, very slow—“I was think­ing of very old times, when the Ro­mans first came here, nine­teen hun­dred years ago—the other day. … Light came out of this river since—you say Knights? Yes; but it is like a run­ning blaze on a plain, like a flash of light­ning in the clouds. We live in the flicker—may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But dark­ness was here yes­ter­day. Imag­ine the feel­ings of a com­man­der of a fine—what d’ye call ’em?—trireme in the Mediter­ranean, or­dered sud­denly to the north; run over­land across the Gauls in a hurry; put in charge of one of these craft the le­gionar­ies—a won­der­ful lot of handy men they must have been, too—used to build, ap­par­ently by the hun­dred, in a month or two, if we may be­lieve what we read. Imag­ine him here—the very end of the world, a sea the colour of lead, a sky the colour of smoke, a kind of ship about as rigid as a con­certina—and go­ing up this river with stores, or or­ders, or what you like. Sand­banks, marshes, forests, sav­ages—pre­cious lit­tle to eat fit for a civ­i­lized man, noth­ing but Thames wa­ter to drink. No Faler­nian wine here, no go­ing ashore. Here and there a mil­i­tary camp lost in a wilder­ness, like a nee­dle in a bun­dle of hay—cold, fog, tem­pests, dis­ease, ex­ile, and death—death skulk­ing in the air, in the wa­ter, in the bush. They must have been dy­ing like flies here. Oh, yes—he did it. Did it very well, too, no doubt, and with­out think­ing much about it ei­ther, ex­cept af­ter­wards to brag of what he had gone through in his time, per­haps. They were men enough to face the dark­ness. And per­haps he was cheered by keep­ing his eye on a chance of pro­mo­tion to the fleet at Ravenna by and by, if he had good friends in Rome and sur­vived the aw­ful cli­mate. Or think of a de­cent young cit­i­zen in a toga—per­haps too much dice, you know—com­ing out here in the train of some pre­fect, or tax-gath­erer, or trader even, to mend his for­tunes. Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some in­land post feel the sav­agery, the ut­ter sav­agery, had closed round him—all that mys­te­ri­ous life of the wilder­ness that stirs in the for­est, in the jun­gles, in the hearts of wild men. There’s no ini­ti­a­tion ei­ther into such mys­ter­ies. He has to live in the midst of the in­com­pre­hen­si­ble, which is also de­testable. And it has a fas­ci­na­tion, too, that goes to work upon him. The fas­ci­na­tion of the abom­i­na­tion—you know, imag­ine the grow­ing re­grets, the long­ing to es­cape, the pow­er­less dis­gust, the sur­ren­der, the hate.”

He paused.

“Mind,” he be­gan again, lift­ing one arm from the el­bow, the palm of the hand out­wards, so that, with his legs folded be­fore him, he had the pose of a Bud­dha preach­ing in Euro­pean clothes and with­out a lo­tus-flower—“Mind, none of us would feel ex­actly like this. What saves us is ef­fi­ciency—the de­vo­tion to ef­fi­ciency. But these chaps were not much ac­count, re­ally. They were no colonists; their ad­min­is­tra­tion was merely a squeeze, and noth­ing more, I sus­pect. They were con­querors, and for that you want only brute force—noth­ing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an ac­ci­dent aris­ing from the weak­ness of oth­ers. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just rob­bery with vi­o­lence, ag­gra­vated mur­der on a great scale, and men go­ing at it blind—as is very proper for those who tackle a dark­ness. The con­quest of the earth, which mostly means the tak­ing it away from those who have a dif­fer­ent com­plex­ion or slightly flat­ter noses than our­selves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What re­deems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sen­ti­men­tal pre­tence but an idea; and an un­selfish be­lief in the idea—some­thing you can set up, and bow down be­fore, and of­fer a sac­ri­fice to. …”

He broke off. Flames glided in the river, small green flames, red flames, white flames, pur­su­ing, over­tak­ing, join­ing, cross­ing each other—then sep­a­rat­ing slowly or hastily. The traf­fic of the great city went on in the deep­en­ing night upon the sleep­less river. We looked on, wait­ing pa­tiently—there was noth­ing else to do till the end of the flood; but it was only af­ter a long si­lence, when he said, in a hes­i­tat­ing voice, “I sup­pose you fel­lows re­mem­ber I did once turn fresh­wa­ter sailor for a bit,” that we knew we were fated, be­fore the ebb be­gan to run, to hear about one of Mar­low’s in­con­clu­sive ex­pe­ri­ences.

“I don’t want to bother you much with what hap­pened to me per­son­ally,” he be­gan, show­ing in this re­mark the weak­ness of many tell­ers of tales who seem so of­ten un­aware of what their au­di­ence would like best to hear; “yet to un­der­stand the ef­fect of it on me you ought to know how I got out there, what I saw, how I went up that river to the place where I first met the poor chap. It was the far­thest point of nav­i­ga­tion and the cul­mi­nat­ing point of my ex­pe­ri­ence. It seemed some­how to throw a kind of light on ev­ery­thing about me—and into my thoughts. It was som­bre enough, too—and piti­ful—not ex­tra­or­di­nary in any way—not very clear ei­ther. No, not very clear. And yet it seemed to throw a kind of light.

“I had then, as you re­mem­ber, just re­turned to Lon­don af­ter a lot of In­dian Ocean, Pa­cific, China Seas—a reg­u­lar dose of the East—six years or so, and I was loaf­ing about, hin­der­ing you fel­lows in your work and in­vad­ing your homes, just as though I had got a heav­enly mis­sion to civ­i­lize you. It was very fine for a time, but af­ter a bit I did get tired of rest­ing. Then I be­gan to look for a ship—I should think the hard­est work on earth. But the ships wouldn’t even look at me. And I got tired of that game, too.

“Now when I was a lit­tle chap I had a pas­sion for maps. I would look for hours at South Amer­ica, or Africa, or Aus­tralia, and lose my­self in all the glo­ries of ex­plo­ration. At that time there were many blank spa­ces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked par­tic­u­larly invit­ing on a map (but they all look that) I would put my fin­ger on it and say, ‘When I grow up I will go there.’ The North Pole was one of these places, I re­mem­ber. Well, I haven’t been there yet, and shall not try now. The glam­our’s off. Other places were scat­tered about the hemi­spheres. I have been in some of them, and … well, we won’t talk about that. But there was one yet—the big­gest, the most blank, so to speak—that I had a han­ker­ing af­ter.

“True, by this time it was not a blank space any more. It had got filled since my boy­hood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of de­light­ful mys­tery—a white patch for a boy to dream glo­ri­ously over. It had be­come a place of dark­ness. But there was in it one river es­pe­cially, a mighty big river, that you could see on the map, re­sem­bling an im­mense snake un­coiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curv­ing afar over a vast coun­try, and its tail lost in the depths of the land. And as I looked at the map of it in a shop­win­dow, it fas­ci­nated me as a snake would a bird—a silly lit­tle bird. Then I re­mem­bered there was a big con­cern, a Com­pany for trade on that river. Dash it all! I thought to my­self, they can’t trade with­out us­ing some kind of craft on that lot of fresh wa­ter—steam­boats! Why shouldn’t I try to get charge of one? I went on along Fleet Street, but could not shake off the idea. The snake had charmed me.

“You un­der­stand it was a Con­ti­nen­tal con­cern, that Trad­ing so­ci­ety; but I have a lot of re­la­tions liv­ing on the Con­ti­nent, be­cause it’s cheap and not so nasty as it looks, they say.

“I am sorry to own I be­gan to worry them. This was al­ready a fresh de­par­ture for me. I was not used to get things that way, you know. I al­ways went my own road and on my own legs where I had a mind to go. I wouldn’t have be­lieved it of my­self; but, then—you see—I felt some­how I must get there by hook or by crook. So I wor­ried them. The men said ‘My dear fel­low,’ and did noth­ing. Then—would you be­lieve it?—I tried the women. I, Char­lie Mar­low, set the women to work—to get a job. Heav­ens! Well, you see, the no­tion drove me. I had an aunt, a dear en­thu­si­as­tic soul. She wrote: ‘It will be de­light­ful. I am ready to do any­thing, any­thing for you. It is a glo­ri­ous idea. I know the wife of a very high per­son­age in the Ad­min­is­tra­tion, and also a man who has lots of in­flu­ence with,’ etc. She was de­ter­mined to make no end of fuss to get me ap­pointed skip­per of a river steam­boat, if such was my fancy.

“I got my ap­point­ment—of course; and I got it very quick. It ap­pears the Com­pany had re­ceived news that one of their cap­tains had been killed in a scuf­fle with the na­tives. This was my chance, and it made me the more anx­ious to go. It was only months and months af­ter­wards, when I made the at­tempt to re­cover what was left of the body, that I heard the orig­i­nal quar­rel arose from a mis­un­der­stand­ing about some hens. Yes, two black hens. Fresleven—that was the fel­low’s name, a Dane—thought him­self wronged some­how in the bar­gain, so he went ashore and started to ham­mer the chief of the vil­lage with a stick. Oh, it didn’t sur­prise me in the least to hear this, and at the same time to be told that Fresleven was the gen­tlest, qui­etest crea­ture that ever walked on two legs. No doubt he was; but he had been a cou­ple of years al­ready out there en­gaged in the no­ble cause, you know, and he prob­a­bly felt the need at last of as­sert­ing his self-re­spect in some way. There­fore he whacked the old nig­ger mer­ci­lessly, while a big crowd of his peo­ple watched him, thun­der­struck, till some man—I was told the chief’s son—in des­per­a­tion at hear­ing the old chap yell, made a ten­ta­tive jab with a spear at the white man—and of course it went quite easy be­tween the shoul­der-blades. Then the whole pop­u­la­tion cleared into the for­est, ex­pect­ing all kinds of calami­ties to hap­pen, while, on the other hand, the steamer Fresleven com­manded left also in a bad panic, in charge of the en­gi­neer, I be­lieve. After­wards no­body seemed to trou­ble much about Fresleven’s re­mains, till I got out and stepped into his shoes. I couldn’t let it rest, though; but when an op­por­tu­nity of­fered at last to meet my pre­de­ces­sor, the grass grow­ing through his ribs was tall enough to hide his bones. They were all there. The su­per­nat­u­ral be­ing had not been touched af­ter he fell. And the vil­lage was de­serted, the huts gaped black, rot­ting, all askew within the fallen en­clo­sures. A calamity had come to it, sure enough. The peo­ple had van­ished. Mad ter­ror had scat­tered them, men, women, and chil­dren, through the bush, and they had never re­turned. What be­came of the hens I don’t know ei­ther. I should think the cause of progress got them, any­how. How­ever, through this glo­ri­ous af­fair I got my ap­point­ment, be­fore I had fairly be­gun to hope for it.

“I flew around like mad to get ready, and be­fore forty-eight hours I was cross­ing the Chan­nel to show my­self to my em­ploy­ers, and sign the con­tract. In a very few hours I ar­rived in a city that al­ways makes me think of a whited sepul­chre. Prej­u­dice no doubt. I had no dif­fi­culty in find­ing the Com­pany’s of­fices. It was the big­gest thing in the town, and ev­ery­body I met was full of it. They were go­ing to run an over­sea em­pire, and make no end of coin by trade.

“A nar­row and de­serted street in deep shadow, high houses, in­nu­mer­able win­dows with vene­tian blinds, a dead si­lence, grass sprout­ing right and left, im­mense dou­ble doors stand­ing pon­der­ously ajar. I slipped through one of these cracks, went up a swept and un­gar­nished stair­case, as arid as a desert, and opened the first door I came to. Two women, one fat and the other slim, sat on straw-bot­tomed chairs, knit­ting black wool. The slim one got up and walked straight at me—still knit­ting with down­cast eyes—and only just as I be­gan to think of get­ting out of her way, as you would for a som­nam­bu­list, stood still, and looked up. Her dress was as plain as an um­brella-cover, and she turned round with­out a word and pre­ceded me into a wait­ing-room. I gave my name, and looked about. Deal ta­ble in the mid­dle, plain chairs all round the walls, on one end a large shin­ing map, marked with all the colours of a rain­bow. There was a vast amount of red—good to see at any time, be­cause one knows that some real work is done in there, a deuce of a lot of blue, a lit­tle green, smears of or­ange, and, on the East Coast, a pur­ple patch, to show where the jolly pi­o­neers of progress drink the jolly lager-beer. How­ever, I wasn’t go­ing into any of these. I was go­ing into the yel­low. Dead in the cen­tre. And the river was there—fas­ci­nat­ing—deadly—like a snake. Ough! A door opened, a white-haired sec­re­tar­ial head, but wear­ing a com­pas­sion­ate ex­pres­sion, ap­peared, and a skinny fore­fin­ger beck­oned me into the sanc­tu­ary. Its light was dim, and a heavy writ­ing-desk squat­ted in the mid­dle. From be­hind that struc­ture came out an im­pres­sion of pale plump­ness in a frock-coat. The great man him­self. He was five feet six, I should judge, and had his grip on the han­dle-end of ever so many mil­lions. He shook hands, I fancy, mur­mured vaguely, was sat­is­fied with my French. Bon Voy­age.

“In about forty-five sec­onds I found my­self again in the wait­ing-room with the com­pas­sion­ate sec­re­tary, who, full of des­o­la­tion and sym­pa­thy, made me sign some doc­u­ment. I be­lieve I un­der­took amongst other things not to dis­close any trade se­crets. Well, I am not go­ing to.

“I be­gan to feel slightly un­easy. You know I am not used to such cer­e­monies, and there was some­thing omi­nous in the at­mos­phere. It was just as though I had been let into some con­spir­acy—I don’t know—some­thing not quite right; and I was glad to get out. In the outer room the two women knit­ted black wool fever­ishly. Peo­ple were ar­riv­ing, and the younger one was walk­ing back and forth in­tro­duc­ing them. The old one sat on her chair. Her flat cloth slip­pers were propped up on a foot-warmer, and a cat re­posed on her lap. She wore a starched white af­fair on her head, had a wart on one cheek, and sil­ver-rimmed spec­ta­cles hung on the tip of her nose. She glanced at me above the glasses. The swift and in­dif­fer­ent placid­ity of that look trou­bled me. Two youths with fool­ish and cheery coun­te­nances were be­ing pi­loted over, and she threw at them the same quick glance of un­con­cerned wis­dom. She seemed to know all about them and about me, too. An eerie feel­ing came over me. She seemed un­canny and fate­ful. Often far away there I thought of these two, guard­ing the door of Dark­ness, knit­ting black wool as for a warm pall, one in­tro­duc­ing, in­tro­duc­ing con­tin­u­ously to the un­known, the other scru­ti­niz­ing the cheery and fool­ish faces with un­con­cerned old eyes. Ave! Old knit­ter of black wool. Mori­t­uri te salu­tant. Not many of those she looked at ever saw her again—not half, by a long way.

“There was yet a visit to the doc­tor. ‘A sim­ple for­mal­ity,’ as­sured me the sec­re­tary, with an air of tak­ing an im­mense part in all my sor­rows. Ac­cord­ingly a young chap wear­ing his hat over the left eye­brow, some clerk I sup­pose—there must have been clerks in the busi­ness, though the house was as still as a house in a city of the dead—came from some­where up­stairs, and led me forth. He was shabby and care­less, with inkstains on the sleeves of his jacket, and his cra­vat was large and bil­lowy, un­der a chin shaped like the toe of an old boot. It was a lit­tle too early for the doc­tor, so I pro­posed a drink, and there­upon he de­vel­oped a vein of jovi­al­ity. As we sat over our ver­mouths he glo­ri­fied the Com­pany’s busi­ness, and by and by I ex­pressed ca­su­ally my sur­prise at him not go­ing out there. He be­came very cool and col­lected all at once. ‘I am not such a fool as I look, quoth Plato to his dis­ci­ples,’ he said sen­ten­tiously, emp­tied his glass with great res­o­lu­tion, and we rose.

“The old doc­tor felt my pulse, ev­i­dently think­ing of some­thing else the while. ‘Good, good for there,’ he mum­bled, and then with a cer­tain ea­ger­ness asked me whether I would let him mea­sure my head. Rather sur­prised, I said Yes, when he pro­duced a thing like calipers and got the di­men­sions back and front and ev­ery way, tak­ing notes care­fully. He was an un­shaven lit­tle man in a thread­bare coat like a gab­er­dine, with his feet in slip­pers, and I thought him a harm­less fool. ‘I al­ways ask leave, in the in­ter­ests of sci­ence, to mea­sure the cra­nia of those go­ing out there,’ he said. ‘And when they come back, too?’ I asked. ‘Oh, I never see them,’ he re­marked; ‘and, more­over, the changes take place in­side, you know.’ He smiled, as if at some quiet joke. ‘So you are go­ing out there. Fa­mous. In­ter­est­ing, too.’ He gave me a search­ing glance, and made an­other note. ‘Ever any mad­ness in your fam­ily?’ he asked, in a mat­ter-of-fact tone. I felt very an­noyed. ‘Is that ques­tion in the in­ter­ests of sci­ence, too?’ ‘It would be,’ he said, with­out tak­ing no­tice of my ir­ri­ta­tion, ‘in­ter­est­ing for sci­ence to watch the men­tal changes of in­di­vid­u­als, on the spot, but …’ ‘Are you an alienist?’ I in­ter­rupted. ‘Every doc­tor should be—a lit­tle,’ an­swered that orig­i­nal, im­per­turbably. ‘I have a lit­tle the­ory which you messieurs who go out there must help me to prove. This is my share in the ad­van­tages my coun­try shall reap from the pos­ses­sion of such a mag­nif­i­cent de­pen­dency. The mere wealth I leave to oth­ers. Par­don my ques­tions, but you are the first English­man com­ing un­der my ob­ser­va­tion …’ I has­tened to as­sure him I was not in the least typ­i­cal. ‘If I were,’ said I, ‘I wouldn’t be talk­ing like this with you.’ ‘What you say is rather pro­found, and prob­a­bly er­ro­neous,’ he said, with a laugh. ‘Avoid ir­ri­ta­tion more than ex­po­sure to the sun. Adieu. How do you English say, eh? Good­bye. Ah! Good­bye. Adieu. In the trop­ics one must be­fore ev­ery­thing keep calm.’ … He lifted a warn­ing fore­fin­ger. … ‘Du calme, du calme.’

“One thing more re­mained to do—say good­bye to my ex­cel­lent aunt. I found her tri­umphant. I had a cup of tea—the last de­cent cup of tea for many days—and in a room that most sooth­ingly looked just as you would ex­pect a lady’s draw­ing-room to look, we had a long quiet chat by the fire­side. In the course of these con­fi­dences it be­came quite plain to me I had been rep­re­sented to the wife of the high dig­ni­tary, and good­ness knows to how many more peo­ple be­sides, as an ex­cep­tional and gifted crea­ture—a piece of good for­tune for the Com­pany—a man you don’t get hold of ev­ery day. Good heav­ens! and I was go­ing to take charge of a twopenny-half­penny river-steam­boat with a penny whis­tle at­tached! It ap­peared, how­ever, I was also one of the Work­ers, with a cap­i­tal—you know. Some­thing like an emis­sary of light, some­thing like a lower sort of apos­tle. There had been a lot of such rot let loose in print and talk just about that time, and the ex­cel­lent woman, liv­ing right in the rush of all that hum­bug, got car­ried off her feet. She talked about ‘wean­ing those ig­no­rant mil­lions from their hor­rid ways,’ till, upon my word, she made me quite un­com­fort­able. I ven­tured to hint that the Com­pany was run for profit.

“ ‘You for­get, dear Char­lie, that the labourer is wor­thy of his hire,’ she said, brightly. It’s queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there has never been any­thing like it, and never can be. It is too beau­ti­ful al­to­gether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces be­fore the first sun­set. Some con­founded fact we men have been liv­ing con­tent­edly with ever since the day of cre­ation would start up and knock the whole thing over.

“After this I got em­braced, told to wear flan­nel, be sure to write of­ten, and so on—and I left. In the street—I don’t know why—a queer feel­ing came to me that I was an im­poster. Odd thing that I, who used to clear out for any part of the world at twenty-four hours’ no­tice, with less thought than most men give to the cross­ing of a street, had a mo­ment—I won’t say of hes­i­ta­tion, but of star­tled pause, be­fore this com­mon­place af­fair. The best way I can ex­plain it to you is by say­ing that, for a sec­ond or two, I felt as though, in­stead of go­ing to the cen­tre of a con­ti­nent, I were about to set off for the cen­tre of the earth.

“I left in a French steamer, and she called in ev­ery blamed port they have out there, for, as far as I could see, the sole pur­pose of land­ing sol­diers and cus­tom­house of­fi­cers. I watched the coast. Watch­ing a coast as it slips by the ship is like think­ing about an enigma. There it is be­fore you—smil­ing, frown­ing, invit­ing, grand, mean, in­sipid, or sav­age, and al­ways mute with an air of whis­per­ing, ‘Come and find out.’ This one was al­most fea­ture­less, as if still in the mak­ing, with an as­pect of mo­not­o­nous grim­ness. The edge of a colos­sal jun­gle, so dark-green as to be al­most black, fringed with white surf, ran straight, like a ruled line, far, far away along a blue sea whose glit­ter was blurred by a creep­ing mist. The sun was fierce, the land seemed to glis­ten and drip with steam. Here and there grey­ish-whitish specks showed up clus­tered in­side the white surf, with a flag fly­ing above them per­haps. Set­tle­ments some cen­turies old, and still no big­ger than pin­heads on the un­touched ex­panse of their back­ground. We pounded along, stopped, landed sol­diers; went on, landed cus­tom­house clerks to levy toll in what looked like a God­for­saken wilder­ness, with a tin shed and a flag­pole lost in it; landed more sol­diers—to take care of the cus­tom­house clerks, pre­sum­ably. Some, I heard, got drowned in the surf; but whether they did or not, no­body seemed par­tic­u­larly to care. They were just flung out there, and on we went. Every day the coast looked the same, as though we had not moved; but we passed var­i­ous places—trad­ing places—with names like Gran’ Bas­sam, Lit­tle Popo; names that seemed to be­long to some sor­did farce acted in front of a sin­is­ter back­cloth. The idle­ness of a pas­sen­ger, my iso­la­tion amongst all these men with whom I had no point of con­tact, the oily and lan­guid sea, the uni­form som­bre­ness of the coast, seemed to keep me away from the truth of things, within the toil of a mourn­ful and sense­less delu­sion. The voice of the surf heard now and then was a pos­i­tive plea­sure, like the speech of a brother. It was some­thing nat­u­ral, that had its rea­son, that had a mean­ing. Now and then a boat from the shore gave one a mo­men­tary con­tact with re­al­ity. It was pad­dled by black fel­lows. You could see from afar the white of their eye­balls glis­ten­ing. They shouted, sang; their bod­ies streamed with per­spi­ra­tion; they had faces like grotesque masks—these chaps; but they had bone, mus­cle, a wild vi­tal­ity, an in­tense en­ergy of move­ment, that was as nat­u­ral and true as the surf along their coast. They wanted no ex­cuse for be­ing there. They were a great com­fort to look at. For a time I would feel I be­longed still to a world of straight­for­ward facts; but the feel­ing would not last long. Some­thing would turn up to scare it away. Once, I re­mem­ber, we came upon a man-of-war an­chored off the coast. There wasn’t even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. It ap­pears the French had one of their wars go­ing on there­abouts. Her en­sign dropped limp like a rag; the muz­zles of the long six-inch guns stuck out all over the low hull; the greasy, slimy swell swung her up lazily and let her down, sway­ing her thin masts. In the empty im­men­sity of earth, sky, and wa­ter, there she was, in­com­pre­hen­si­ble, fir­ing into a con­ti­nent. Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and van­ish, a lit­tle white smoke would dis­ap­pear, a tiny pro­jec­tile would give a fee­ble screech—and noth­ing hap­pened. Noth­ing could hap­pen. There was a touch of in­san­ity in the pro­ceed­ing, a sense of lugubri­ous drollery in the sight; and it was not dis­si­pated by some­body on board as­sur­ing me earnestly there was a camp of na­tives—he called them en­e­mies!—hid­den out of sight some­where.

“We gave her her let­ters (I heard the men in that lonely ship were dy­ing of fever at the rate of three a day) and went on. We called at some more places with far­ci­cal names, where the merry dance of death and trade goes on in a still and earthy at­mos­phere as of an over­heated cat­a­comb; all along the form­less coast bor­dered by dan­ger­ous surf, as if Na­ture her­self had tried to ward off in­trud­ers; in and out of rivers, streams of death in life, whose banks were rot­ting into mud, whose wa­ters, thick­ened into slime, in­vaded the con­torted man­groves, that seemed to writhe at us in the ex­trem­ity of an im­po­tent de­spair. Nowhere did we stop long enough to get a par­tic­u­lar­ized im­pres­sion, but the gen­eral sense of vague and op­pres­sive won­der grew upon me. It was like a weary pil­grim­age amongst hints for night­mares.

“It was up­ward of thirty days be­fore I saw the mouth of the big river. We an­chored off the seat of the gov­ern­ment. But my work would not be­gin till some two hun­dred miles far­ther on. So as soon as I could I made a start for a place thirty miles higher up.

“I had my pas­sage on a lit­tle seago­ing steamer. Her cap­tain was a Swede, and know­ing me for a sea­man, in­vited me on the bridge. He was a young man, lean, fair, and mo­rose, with lanky hair and a shuf­fling gait. As we left the mis­er­able lit­tle wharf, he tossed his head con­temp­tu­ously at the shore. ‘Been liv­ing there?’ he asked. I said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Fine lot these gov­ern­ment chaps—are they not?’ he went on, speak­ing English with great pre­ci­sion and con­sid­er­able bit­ter­ness. ‘It is funny what some peo­ple will do for a few francs a month. I won­der what be­comes of that kind when it goes up­coun­try?’ I said to him I ex­pected to see that soon. ‘So-o-o!’ he ex­claimed. He shuf­fled athwart, keep­ing one eye ahead vig­i­lantly. ‘Don’t be too sure,’ he con­tin­ued. ‘The other day I took up a man who hanged him­self on the road. He was a Swede, too.’ ‘Hanged him­self! Why, in God’s name?’ I cried. He kept on look­ing out watch­fully. ‘Who knows? The sun too much for him, or the coun­try per­haps.’

“At last we opened a reach. A rocky cliff ap­peared, mounds of turned-up earth by the shore, houses on a hill, oth­ers with iron roofs, amongst a waste of ex­ca­va­tions, or hang­ing to the de­cliv­ity. A con­tin­u­ous noise of the rapids above hov­ered over this scene of in­hab­ited dev­as­ta­tion. A lot of peo­ple, mostly black and naked, moved about like ants. A jetty pro­jected into the river. A blind­ing sun­light drowned all this at times in a sud­den re­crude­s­cence of glare. ‘There’s your Com­pany’s sta­tion,’ said the Swede, point­ing to three wooden bar­rack-like struc­tures on the rocky slope. ‘I will send your things up. Four boxes did you say? So. Farewell.’

“I came upon a boiler wal­low­ing in the grass, then found a path lead­ing up the hill. It turned aside for the boul­ders, and also for an un­der­sized rail­way-truck ly­ing there on its back with its wheels in the air. One was off. The thing looked as dead as the car­cass of some an­i­mal. I came upon more pieces of de­cay­ing ma­chin­ery, a stack of rusty rails. To the left a clump of trees made a shady spot, where dark things seemed to stir fee­bly. I blinked, the path was steep. A horn tooted to the right, and I saw the black peo­ple run. A heavy and dull det­o­na­tion shook the ground, a puff of smoke came out of the cliff, and that was all. No change ap­peared on the face of the rock. They were build­ing a rail­way. The cliff was not in the way or any­thing; but this ob­ject­less blast­ing was all the work go­ing on.

“A slight clink­ing be­hind me made me turn my head. Six black men ad­vanced in a file, toil­ing up the path. They walked erect and slow, bal­anc­ing small bas­kets full of earth on their heads, and the clink kept time with their foot­steps. Black rags were wound round their loins, and the short ends be­hind wag­gled to and fro like tails. I could see ev­ery rib, the joints of their limbs were like knots in a rope; each had an iron col­lar on his neck, and all were con­nected to­gether with a chain whose bights swung be­tween them, rhyth­mi­cally clink­ing. Another re­port from the cliff made me think sud­denly of that ship of war I had seen fir­ing into a con­ti­nent. It was the same kind of omi­nous voice; but these men could by no stretch of imag­i­na­tion be called en­e­mies. They were called crim­i­nals, and the out­raged law, like the burst­ing shells, had come to them, an in­sol­u­ble mys­tery from the sea. All their mea­gre breasts panted to­gether, the vi­o­lently di­lated nos­trils quiv­ered, the eyes stared stonily up­hill. They passed me within six inches, with­out a glance, with that com­plete, death­like in­dif­fer­ence of un­happy sav­ages. Be­hind this raw mat­ter one of the re­claimed, the prod­uct of the new forces at work, strolled de­spon­dently, car­ry­ing a ri­fle by its mid­dle. He had a uni­form jacket with one but­ton off, and see­ing a white man on the path, hoisted his weapon to his shoul­der with alacrity. This was sim­ple pru­dence, white men be­ing so much alike at a dis­tance that he could not tell who I might be. He was speed­ily re­as­sured, and with a large, white, ras­cally grin, and a glance at his charge, seemed to take me into part­ner­ship in his ex­alted trust. After all, I also was a part of the great cause of these high and just pro­ceed­ings.

“In­stead of go­ing up, I turned and de­scended to the left. My idea was to let that chain-gang get out of sight be­fore I climbed the hill. You know I am not par­tic­u­larly ten­der; I’ve had to strike and to fend off. I’ve had to re­sist and to at­tack some­times—that’s only one way of re­sist­ing—with­out count­ing the ex­act cost, ac­cord­ing to the de­mands of such sort of life as I had blun­dered into. I’ve seen the devil of vi­o­lence, and the devil of greed, and the devil of hot de­sire; but, by all the stars! these were strong, lusty, red-eyed dev­ils, that swayed and drove men—men, I tell you. But as I stood on this hill­side, I fore­saw that in the blind­ing sun­shine of that land I would be­come ac­quainted with a flabby, pre­tend­ing, weak-eyed devil of a ra­pa­cious and piti­less folly. How in­sid­i­ous he could be, too, I was only to find out sev­eral months later and a thou­sand miles far­ther. For a mo­ment I stood ap­palled, as though by a warn­ing. Fi­nally I de­scended the hill, obliquely, to­wards the trees I had seen.

“I avoided a vast ar­ti­fi­cial hole some­body had been dig­ging on the slope, the pur­pose of which I found it im­pos­si­ble to di­vine. It wasn’t a quarry or a sand­pit, any­how. It was just a hole. It might have been con­nected with the phil­an­thropic de­sire of giv­ing the crim­i­nals some­thing to do. I don’t know. Then I nearly fell into a very nar­row ravine, al­most no more than a scar in the hill­side. I dis­cov­ered that a lot of im­ported drainage-pipes for the set­tle­ment had been tum­bled in there. There wasn’t one that was not bro­ken. It was a wan­ton smashup. At last I got un­der the trees. My pur­pose was to stroll into the shade for a mo­ment; but no sooner within than it seemed to me I had stepped into the gloomy cir­cle of some In­ferno. The rapids were near, and an un­in­ter­rupted, uni­form, head­long, rush­ing noise filled the mourn­ful still­ness of the grove, where not a breath stirred, not a leaf moved, with a mys­te­ri­ous sound—as though the tear­ing pace of the launched earth had sud­denly be­come au­di­ble.

“Black shapes crouched, lay, sat be­tween the trees lean­ing against the trunks, cling­ing to the earth, half com­ing out, half ef­faced within the dim light, in all the at­ti­tudes of pain, aban­don­ment, and de­spair. Another mine on the cliff went off, fol­lowed by a slight shud­der of the soil un­der my feet. The work was go­ing on. The work! And this was the place where some of the helpers had with­drawn to die.

“They were dy­ing slowly—it was very clear. They were not en­e­mies, they were not crim­i­nals, they were noth­ing earthly now—noth­ing but black shad­ows of dis­ease and star­va­tion, ly­ing con­fus­edly in the green­ish gloom. Brought from all the re­cesses of the coast in all the le­gal­ity of time con­tracts, lost in un­con­ge­nial sur­round­ings, fed on un­fa­mil­iar food, they sick­ened, be­came in­ef­fi­cient, and were then al­lowed to crawl away and rest. Th­ese mori­bund shapes were free as air—and nearly as thin. I be­gan to dis­tin­guish the gleam of the eyes un­der the trees. Then, glanc­ing down, I saw a face near my hand. The black bones re­clined at full length with one shoul­der against the tree, and slowly the eye­lids rose and the sunken eyes looked up at me, enor­mous and va­cant, a kind of blind, white flicker in the depths of the orbs, which died out slowly. The man seemed young—al­most a boy—but you know with them it’s hard to tell. I found noth­ing else to do but to of­fer him one of my good Swede’s ship’s bis­cuits I had in my pocket. The fin­gers closed slowly on it and held—there was no other move­ment and no other glance. He had tied a bit of white worsted round his neck—Why? Where did he get it? Was it a badge—an or­na­ment—a charm—a pro­pi­tia­tory act? Was there any idea at all con­nected with it? It looked star­tling round his black neck, this bit of white thread from be­yond the seas.

“Near the same tree two more bun­dles of acute an­gles sat with their legs drawn up. One, with his chin propped on his knees, stared at noth­ing, in an in­tol­er­a­ble and ap­palling man­ner: his brother phan­tom rested its fore­head, as if over­come with a great weari­ness; and all about oth­ers were scat­tered in ev­ery pose of con­torted col­lapse, as in some pic­ture of a mas­sacre or a pesti­lence. While I stood hor­ror-struck, one of these crea­tures rose to his hands and knees, and went off on all-fours to­wards the river to drink. He lapped out of his hand, then sat up in the sun­light, cross­ing his shins in front of him, and af­ter a time let his woolly head fall on his breast­bone.

“I didn’t want any more loi­ter­ing in the shade, and I made haste to­wards the sta­tion. When near the build­ings I met a white man, in such an un­ex­pected el­e­gance of getup 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 book­keep­ing was done at this sta­tion. He had come out for a mo­ment, he said, ‘to get a breath of fresh air.’ The ex­pres­sion sounded won­der­fully odd, with its sug­ges­tion of seden­tary desk-life. I wouldn’t have men­tioned the fel­low to you at all, only it was from his lips that I first heard the name of the man who is so in­dis­sol­ubly con­nected with the mem­o­ries of that time. More­over, I re­spected the fel­low. Yes; I re­spected his col­lars, his vast cuffs, his brushed hair. His ap­pear­ance was cer­tainly that of a hair­dresser’s dummy; but in the great de­mor­al­iza­tion of the land he kept up his ap­pear­ance. That’s back­bone. His starched col­lars and got-up shirt­fronts were achieve­ments of char­ac­ter. He had been out nearly three years; and, later, I could not help ask­ing him how he man­aged to sport such linen. He had just the faintest blush, and said mod­estly, ‘I’ve been teach­ing one of the na­tive women about the sta­tion. It was dif­fi­cult. She had a dis­taste for the work.’ Thus this man had ver­ily ac­com­plished some­thing. And he was de­voted to his books, which were in ap­ple-pie or­der.

“Every­thing else in the sta­tion was in a mud­dle—heads, things, build­ings. Strings of dusty nig­gers with splay feet ar­rived and de­parted; a stream of man­u­fac­tured goods, rub­bishy cot­tons, beads, and brass-wire sent into the depths of dark­ness, and in re­turn came a pre­cious trickle of ivory.

“I had to wait in the sta­tion for ten days—an eter­nity. I lived in a hut in the yard, but to be out of the chaos I would some­times get into the ac­coun­tant’s of­fice. It was built of hor­i­zon­tal planks, and so badly put to­gether that, as he bent over his high desk, he was barred from neck to heels with nar­row strips of sun­light. There was no need to open the big shut­ter to see. It was hot there, too; big flies buzzed fiendishly, and did not sting, but stabbed. I sat gen­er­ally on the floor, while, of fault­less ap­pear­ance (and even slightly scented), perch­ing on a high stool, he wrote, he wrote. Some­times he stood up for ex­er­cise. When a truckle-bed with a sick man (some in­valid agent from up­coun­try) was put in there, he ex­hib­ited a gen­tle an­noy­ance. ‘The groans of this sick per­son,’ he said, ‘dis­tract my at­ten­tion. And with­out that it is ex­tremely dif­fi­cult to guard against cler­i­cal er­rors in this cli­mate.’

“One day he re­marked, with­out lift­ing his head, ‘In the in­te­rior you will no doubt meet Mr. Kurtz.’ On my ask­ing who Mr. Kurtz was, he said he was a first-class agent; and see­ing my dis­ap­point­ment at this in­for­ma­tion, he added slowly, lay­ing down his pen, ‘He is a very re­mark­able per­son.’ Fur­ther ques­tions elicited from him that Mr. Kurtz was at present in charge of a trad­ing-post, a very im­por­tant one, in the true ivory-coun­try, at ‘the very bot­tom of there. Sends in as much ivory as all the oth­ers put to­gether …’ He be­gan to write again. The sick man was too ill to groan. The flies buzzed in a great peace.

“Sud­denly there was a grow­ing mur­mur of voices and a great tramp­ing of feet. A car­a­van had come in. A vi­o­lent bab­ble of un­couth sounds burst out on the other side of the planks. All the car­ri­ers were speak­ing to­gether, and in the midst of the up­roar the lam­en­ta­ble voice of the chief agent was heard ‘giv­ing it up’ tear­fully for the twen­ti­eth time that day. … He rose slowly. ‘What a fright­ful row,’ he said. He crossed the room gen­tly to look at the sick man, and re­turn­ing, said to me, ‘He does not hear.’ ‘What! Dead?’ I asked, star­tled. ‘No, not yet,’ he an­swered, with great com­po­sure. Then, al­lud­ing with a toss of the head to the tu­mult in the sta­tion-yard, ‘When one has got to make cor­rect en­tries, one comes to hate those sav­ages—hate them to the death.’ He re­mained thought­ful for a mo­ment. ‘When you see Mr. Kurtz,’ he went on, ‘tell him from me that ev­ery­thing here’—he glanced at the deck—‘is very sat­is­fac­tory. I don’t like to write to him—with those mes­sen­gers of ours you never know who may get hold of your let­ter—at that Cen­tral Sta­tion.’ He stared at me for a mo­ment with his mild, bulging eyes. ‘Oh, he will go far, very far,’ he be­gan again. ‘He will be a some­body in the Ad­min­is­tra­tion be­fore long. They, above—the Coun­cil in Europe, you know—mean him to be.’

“He turned to his work. The noise out­side had ceased, and presently in go­ing out I stopped at the door. In the steady buzz of flies the home­ward-bound agent was ly­ing fin­ished and in­sen­si­ble; the other, bent over his books, was mak­ing cor­rect en­tries of per­fectly cor­rect trans­ac­tions; and fifty feet be­low the doorstep I could see the still tree­tops of the grove of death.

“Next day I left that sta­tion at last, with a car­a­van of sixty men, for a two-hun­dred-mile tramp.

“No use telling you much about that. Paths, paths, ev­ery­where; a stamped-in net­work of paths spread­ing over the empty land, through the long grass, through burnt grass, through thick­ets, down and up chilly ravines, up and down stony hills ablaze with heat; and a soli­tude, a soli­tude, no­body, not a hut. The pop­u­la­tion had cleared out a long time ago. Well, if a lot of mys­te­ri­ous nig­gers armed with all kinds of fear­ful weapons sud­denly took to trav­el­ling on the road be­tween Deal and Gravesend, catch­ing the yokels right and left to carry heavy loads for them, I fancy ev­ery farm and cot­tage there­abouts would get empty very soon. Only here the dwellings were gone, too. Still I passed through sev­eral aban­doned vil­lages. There’s some­thing pa­thet­i­cally child­ish in the ru­ins of grass walls. Day af­ter day, with the stamp and shuf­fle of sixty pair of bare feet be­hind me, each pair un­der a 60-lb. load. Camp, cook, sleep, strike camp, march. Now and then a car­rier dead in har­ness, at rest in the long grass near the path, with an empty wa­ter-gourd and his long staff ly­ing by his side. A great si­lence around and above. Per­haps on some quiet night the tremor of far-off drums, sink­ing, swelling, a tremor vast, faint; a sound weird, ap­peal­ing, sug­ges­tive, and wild—and per­haps with as pro­found a mean­ing as the sound of bells in a Chris­tian coun­try. Once a white man in an un­but­toned uni­form, camp­ing on the path with an armed es­cort of lank Zanz­ibaris, very hos­pitable and fes­tive—not to say drunk. Was look­ing af­ter the up­keep of the road, he de­clared. Can’t say I saw any road or any up­keep, un­less the body of a mid­dle-aged ne­gro, with a bul­let-hole in the fore­head, upon which I ab­so­lutely stum­bled three miles far­ther on, may be con­sid­ered as a per­ma­nent im­prove­ment. I had a white com­pan­ion, too, not a bad chap, but rather too fleshy and with the ex­as­per­at­ing habit of faint­ing on the hot hill­sides, miles away from the least bit of shade and wa­ter. An­noy­ing, you know, to hold your own coat like a para­sol over a man’s head while he is com­ing to. I couldn’t help ask­ing him once what he meant by com­ing there at all. ‘To make money, of course. What do you think?’ he said, scorn­fully. Then he got fever, and had to be car­ried in a ham­mock slung un­der a pole. As he weighed six­teen stone I had no end of rows with the car­ri­ers. They jibbed, ran away, sneaked off with their loads in the night—quite a mutiny. So, one evening, I made a speech in English with ges­tures, not one of which was lost to the sixty pairs of eyes be­fore me, and the next morn­ing I started the ham­mock off in front all right. An hour af­ter­wards I came upon the whole con­cern wrecked in a bush—man, ham­mock, groans, blan­kets, hor­rors. The heavy pole had skinned his poor nose. He was very anx­ious for me to kill some­body, but there wasn’t the shadow of a car­rier near. I re­mem­bered the old doc­tor—‘It would be in­ter­est­ing for sci­ence to watch the men­tal changes of in­di­vid­u­als, on the spot.’ I felt I was be­com­ing sci­en­tif­i­cally in­ter­est­ing. How­ever, all that is to no pur­pose. On the fif­teenth day I came in sight of the big river again, and hob­bled into the Cen­tral Sta­tion. It was on a back wa­ter sur­rounded by scrub and for­est, with a pretty bor­der of smelly mud on one side, and on the three oth­ers en­closed by a crazy fence of rushes. A ne­glected gap was all the gate it had, and the first glance at the place was enough to let you see the flabby devil was run­ning that show. White men with long staves in their hands ap­peared lan­guidly from amongst the build­ings, strolling up to take a look at me, and then re­tired out of sight some­where. One of them, a stout, ex­citable chap with black mous­taches, in­formed me with great vol­u­bil­ity and many di­gres­sions, as soon as I told him who I was, that my steamer was at the bot­tom of the river. I was thun­der­struck. What, how, why? Oh, it was ‘all right.’ The ‘man­ager him­self’ was there. All quite cor­rect. ‘Every­body had be­haved splen­didly! splen­didly!’—‘you must,’ he said in ag­i­ta­tion, ‘go and see the gen­eral man­ager at once. He is wait­ing!’

“I did not see the real sig­nif­i­cance of that wreck at once. I fancy I see it now, but I am not sure—not at all. Cer­tainly the af­fair was too stupid—when I think of it—to be al­to­gether nat­u­ral. Still … But at the mo­ment it pre­sented it­self sim­ply as a con­founded nui­sance. The steamer was sunk. They had started two days be­fore in a sud­den hurry up the river with the man­ager on board, in charge of some vol­un­teer skip­per, and be­fore they had been out three hours they tore the bot­tom out of her on stones, and she sank near the south bank. I asked my­self what I was to do there, now my boat was lost. As a mat­ter of fact, I had plenty to do in fish­ing my com­mand out of the river. I had to set about it the very next day. That, and the re­pairs when I brought the pieces to the sta­tion, took some months.

“My first in­ter­view with the man­ager was cu­ri­ous. He did not ask me to sit down af­ter my twenty-mile walk that morn­ing. He was com­mon­place in com­plex­ion, in fea­tures, in man­ners, and in voice. He was of mid­dle size and of or­di­nary build. His eyes, of the usual blue, were per­haps re­mark­ably cold, and he cer­tainly could make his glance fall on one as tren­chant and heavy as an axe. But even at these times the rest of his per­son seemed to dis­claim the in­ten­tion. Other­wise there was only an in­de­fin­able, faint ex­pres­sion of his lips, some­thing stealthy—a smile—not a smile—I re­mem­ber it, but I can’t ex­plain. It was un­con­scious, this smile was, though just af­ter he had said some­thing it got in­ten­si­fied for an in­stant. It came at the end of his speeches like a seal ap­plied on the words to make the mean­ing of the com­mon­est phrase ap­pear ab­so­lutely in­scrutable. He was a com­mon trader, from his youth up em­ployed in these parts—noth­ing more. He was obeyed, yet he in­spired nei­ther love nor fear, nor even re­spect. He in­spired un­easi­ness. That was it! Uneasi­ness. Not a def­i­nite mis­trust—just un­easi­ness—noth­ing more. You have no idea how ef­fec­tive such a … a … fac­ulty can be. He had no ge­nius for or­ga­niz­ing, for ini­tia­tive, or for or­der even. That was ev­i­dent in such things as the de­plorable state of the sta­tion. He had no learn­ing, and no in­tel­li­gence. His po­si­tion had come to him—why? Per­haps be­cause he was never ill … He had served three terms of three years out there … Be­cause tri­umphant health in the gen­eral rout of con­sti­tu­tions is a kind of power in it­self. When he went home on leave he ri­oted on a large scale—pompously. Jack ashore—with a dif­fer­ence—in ex­ter­nals only. This one could gather from his ca­sual talk. He orig­i­nated noth­ing, he could keep the rou­tine go­ing—that’s all. But he was great. He was great by this lit­tle thing that it was im­pos­si­ble to tell what could con­trol such a man. He never gave that se­cret away. Per­haps there was noth­ing within him. Such a sus­pi­cion made one pause—for out there there were no ex­ter­nal checks. Once when var­i­ous trop­i­cal dis­eases had laid low al­most ev­ery ‘agent’ in the sta­tion, he was heard to say, ‘Men who come out here should have no en­trails.’ He sealed the ut­ter­ance with that smile of his, as though it had been a door open­ing into a dark­ness he had in his keep­ing. You fan­cied you had seen things—but the seal was on. When an­noyed at meal­times by the con­stant quar­rels of the white men about prece­dence, he or­dered an im­mense round ta­ble to be made, for which a spe­cial house had to be built. This was the sta­tion’s mess­room. 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 up­river sta­tions had to be re­lieved. There had been so many de­lays al­ready that he did not know who was dead and who was alive, and how they got on—and so on, and so on. He paid no at­ten­tion to my ex­pla­na­tions, and, play­ing with a stick of seal­ing-wax, re­peated sev­eral times that the sit­u­a­tion was ‘very grave, very grave.’ There were ru­mours that a very im­por­tant sta­tion was in jeop­ardy, and its chief, Mr. Kurtz, was ill. Hoped it was not true. Mr. Kurtz was … I felt weary and ir­ri­ta­ble. Hang Kurtz, I thought. I in­ter­rupted him by say­ing I had heard of Mr. Kurtz on the coast. ‘Ah! So they talk of him down there,’ he mur­mured to him­self. Then he be­gan again, as­sur­ing me Mr. Kurtz was the best agent he had, an ex­cep­tional man, of the great­est im­por­tance to the Com­pany; there­fore I could un­der­stand his anx­i­ety. He was, he said, ‘very, very un­easy.’ Cer­tainly he fid­geted on his chair a good deal, ex­claimed, ‘Ah, Mr. Kurtz!’ broke the stick of seal­ing-wax and seemed dum­founded by the ac­ci­dent. Next thing he wanted to know ‘how long it would take to’ … I in­ter­rupted him again. Be­ing hun­gry, you know, and kept on my feet too. I was get­ting sav­age. ‘How can I tell?’ I said. ‘I haven’t even seen the wreck yet—some months, no doubt.’ All this talk seemed to me so fu­tile. ‘Some months,’ he said. ‘Well, let us say three months be­fore we can make a start. Yes. That ought to do the af­fair.’ I flung out of his hut (he lived all alone in a clay hut with a sort of ve­ran­dah) mut­ter­ing to my­self my opin­ion of him. He was a chat­ter­ing id­iot. After­wards I took it back when it was borne in upon me star­tlingly with what ex­treme nicety he had es­ti­mated the time req­ui­site for the ‘af­fair.’

“I went to work the next day, turn­ing, so to speak, my back on that sta­tion. In that way only it seemed to me I could keep my hold on the re­deem­ing facts of life. Still, one must look about some­times; and then I saw this sta­tion, these men strolling aim­lessly about in the sun­shine of the yard. I asked my­self some­times what it all meant. They wan­dered here and there with their ab­surd long staves in their hands, like a lot of faith­less pil­grims be­witched in­side a rot­ten fence. The word ‘ivory’ rang in the air, was whis­pered, was sighed. You would think they were pray­ing to it. A taint of im­be­cile ra­pac­ity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse. By Jove! I’ve never seen any­thing so un­real in my life. And out­side, the silent wilder­ness sur­round­ing this cleared speck on the earth struck me as some­thing great and in­vin­ci­ble, like evil or truth, wait­ing pa­tiently for the pass­ing away of this fan­tas­tic in­va­sion.

“Oh, these months! Well, never mind. Var­i­ous things hap­pened. One evening a grass shed full of cal­ico, cot­ton prints, beads, and I don’t know what else, burst into a blaze so sud­denly that you would have thought the earth had opened to let an aveng­ing fire con­sume all that trash. I was smok­ing my pipe qui­etly by my dis­man­tled steamer, and saw them all cut­ting ca­pers in the light, with their arms lifted high, when the stout man with mous­taches came tear­ing down to the river, a tin pail in his hand, as­sured me that ev­ery­body was ‘be­hav­ing splen­didly, splen­didly,’ dipped about a quart of wa­ter and tore back again. I no­ticed there was a hole in the bot­tom of his pail.

“I strolled up. There was no hurry. You see the thing had gone off like a box of matches. It had been hope­less from the very first. The flame had leaped high, driven ev­ery­body back, lighted up ev­ery­thing—and col­lapsed. The shed was al­ready a heap of em­bers glow­ing fiercely. A nig­ger was be­ing beaten near by. They said he had caused the fire in some way; be that as it may, he was screech­ing most hor­ri­bly. I saw him, later, for sev­eral days, sit­ting in a bit of shade look­ing very sick and try­ing to re­cover him­self; af­ter­wards he arose and went out—and the wilder­ness with­out a sound took him into its bo­som again. As I ap­proached the glow from the dark I found my­self at the back of two men, talk­ing. I heard the name of Kurtz pro­nounced, then the words, ‘take ad­van­tage of this un­for­tu­nate ac­ci­dent.’ One of the men was the man­ager. I wished him a good evening. ‘Did you ever see any­thing like it—eh? it is in­cred­i­ble,’ he said, and walked off. The other man re­mained. He was a first-class agent, young, gen­tle­manly, a bit re­served, with a forked lit­tle beard and a hooked nose. He was stand­off­ish with the other agents, and they on their side said he was the man­ager’s spy upon them. As to me, I had hardly ever spo­ken to him be­fore. We got into talk, and by and by we strolled away from the hiss­ing ru­ins. Then he asked me to his room, which was in the main build­ing of the sta­tion. He struck a match, and I per­ceived that this young aris­to­crat had not only a sil­ver-mounted dress­ing-case but also a whole can­dle all to him­self. Just at that time the man­ager was the only man sup­posed to have any right to can­dles. Na­tive mats cov­ered the clay walls; a col­lec­tion of spears, as­segais, shields, knives was hung up in tro­phies. The busi­ness in­trusted to this fel­low was the mak­ing of bricks—so I had been in­formed; but there wasn’t a frag­ment of a brick any­where in the sta­tion, and he had been there more than a year—wait­ing. It seems he could not make bricks with­out some­thing, I don’t know what—straw maybe. Any­way, it could not be found there and as it was not likely to be sent from Europe, it did not ap­pear clear to me what he was wait­ing for. An act of spe­cial cre­ation per­haps. How­ever, they were all wait­ing—all the six­teen or twenty pil­grims of them—for some­thing; and upon my word it did not seem an un­con­ge­nial oc­cu­pa­tion, from the way they took it, though the only thing that ever came to them was dis­ease—as far as I could see. They be­guiled the time by back­bit­ing and in­trigu­ing against each other in a fool­ish kind of way. There was an air of plot­ting about that sta­tion, but noth­ing came of it, of course. It was as un­real as ev­ery­thing else—as the phil­an­thropic pre­tence of the whole con­cern, as their talk, as their gov­ern­ment, as their show of work. The only real feel­ing was a de­sire to get ap­pointed to a trad­ing-post where ivory was to be had, so that they could earn per­cent­ages. They in­trigued and slan­dered and hated each other only on that ac­count—but as to ef­fec­tu­ally lift­ing a lit­tle fin­ger—oh, no. By heav­ens! there is some­thing af­ter all in the world al­low­ing one man to steal a horse while an­other must not look at a hal­ter. Steal a horse straight out. Very well. He has done it. Per­haps he can ride. But there is a way of look­ing at a hal­ter that would pro­voke the most char­i­ta­ble of saints into a kick.

“I had no idea why he wanted to be so­cia­ble, but as we chat­ted in there it sud­denly oc­curred to me the fel­low was try­ing to get at some­thing—in fact, pump­ing me. He al­luded con­stantly to Europe, to the peo­ple I was sup­posed to know there—putting lead­ing ques­tions as to my ac­quain­tances in the sepul­chral city, and so on. His lit­tle eyes glit­tered like mica discs—with cu­rios­ity—though he tried to keep up a bit of su­per­cil­ious­ness. At first I was as­ton­ished, but very soon I be­came aw­fully cu­ri­ous to see what he would find out from me. I couldn’t pos­si­bly imag­ine what I had in me to make it worth his while. It was very pretty to see how he baf­fled him­self, for in truth my body was full only of chills, and my head had noth­ing in it but that wretched steam­boat busi­ness. It was ev­i­dent he took me for a per­fectly shame­less pre­var­i­ca­tor. At last he got an­gry, and, to con­ceal a move­ment of fu­ri­ous an­noy­ance, he yawned. I rose. Then I no­ticed a small sketch in oils, on a panel, rep­re­sent­ing a woman, draped and blind­folded, car­ry­ing a lighted torch. The back­ground was som­bre—al­most black. The move­ment of the woman was stately, and the ef­fect of the torch­light on the face was sin­is­ter.

“It ar­rested me, and he stood by civilly, hold­ing an empty half-pint cham­pagne bot­tle (med­i­cal com­forts) with the can­dle stuck in it. To my ques­tion he said Mr. Kurtz had painted this—in this very sta­tion more than a year ago—while wait­ing for means to go to his trad­ing post. ‘Tell me, pray,’ said I, ‘who is this Mr. Kurtz?’

“ ‘The chief of the In­ner Sta­tion,’ he an­swered in a short tone, look­ing away. ‘Much obliged,’ I said, laugh­ing. ‘And you are the brick­maker of the Cen­tral Sta­tion. Every­one knows that.’ He was silent for a while. ‘He is a prodigy,’ he said at last. ‘He is an emis­sary of pity and sci­ence and progress, and devil knows what else. We want,’ he be­gan to de­claim sud­denly, ‘for the guid­ance of the cause in­trusted to us by Europe, so to speak, higher in­tel­li­gence, wide sym­pa­thies, a sin­gle­ness of pur­pose.’ ‘Who says that?’ I asked. ‘Lots of them,’ he replied. ‘Some even write that; and so he comes here, a spe­cial be­ing, as you ought to know.’ ‘Why ought I to know?’ I in­ter­rupted, re­ally sur­prised. He paid no at­ten­tion. ‘Yes. To­day he is chief of the best sta­tion, next year he will be as­sis­tant-man­ager, two years more and … but I dare­say you know what he will be in two years’ time. You are of the new gang—the gang of virtue. The same peo­ple who sent him spe­cially also rec­om­mended you. Oh, don’t say no. I’ve my own eyes to trust.’ Light dawned upon me. My dear aunt’s in­flu­en­tial ac­quain­tances were pro­duc­ing an un­ex­pected ef­fect upon that young man. I nearly burst into a laugh. ‘Do you read the Com­pany’s con­fi­den­tial cor­re­spon­dence?’ I asked. He hadn’t a word to say. It was great fun. ‘When Mr. Kurtz,’ I con­tin­ued, se­verely, ‘is Gen­eral Man­ager, you won’t have the op­por­tu­nity.’

“He blew the can­dle out sud­denly, and we went out­side. The moon had risen. Black fig­ures strolled about list­lessly, pour­ing wa­ter on the glow, whence pro­ceeded a sound of hiss­ing; steam as­cended in the moon­light, the beaten nig­ger groaned some­where. ‘What a row the brute makes!’ said the in­de­fati­ga­ble man with the mous­taches, ap­pear­ing near us. ‘Serve him right. Trans­gres­sion—pun­ish­ment—bang! Pi­ti­less, piti­less. That’s the only way. This will pre­vent all con­fla­gra­tions for the fu­ture. I was just telling the man­ager …’ He no­ticed my com­pan­ion, and be­came crest­fallen all at once. ‘Not in bed yet,’ he said, with a kind of servile hearti­ness; ‘it’s so nat­u­ral. Ha! Danger—ag­i­ta­tion.’ He van­ished. I went on to the river­side, and the other fol­lowed me. I heard a scathing mur­mur at my ear, ‘Heap of muffs—go to.’ The pil­grims could be seen in knots ges­tic­u­lat­ing, dis­cussing. Sev­eral had still their staves in their hands. I ver­ily be­lieve they took these sticks to bed with them. Beyond the fence the for­est stood up spec­trally in the moon­light, and through that dim stir, through the faint sounds of that lam­en­ta­ble court­yard, the si­lence of the land went home to one’s very heart—its mys­tery, its great­ness, the amaz­ing re­al­ity of its con­cealed life. The hurt nig­ger moaned fee­bly some­where near by, and then fetched a deep sigh that made me mend my pace away from there. I felt a hand in­tro­duc­ing it­self un­der my arm. ‘My dear sir,’ said the fel­low, ‘I don’t want to be mis­un­der­stood, and es­pe­cially by you, who will see Mr. Kurtz long be­fore I can have that plea­sure. I wouldn’t like him to get a false idea of my dis­po­si­tion. …’

“I let him run on, this pa­pier-mâché Mephistophe­les, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my fore­fin­ger through him, and would find noth­ing in­side but a lit­tle loose dirt, maybe. He, don’t you see, had been plan­ning to be as­sis­tant-man­ager by and by un­der the present man, and I could see that the com­ing of that Kurtz had up­set them both not a lit­tle. He talked pre­cip­i­tately, and I did not try to stop him. I had my shoul­ders against the wreck of my steamer, hauled up on the slope like a car­cass of some big river an­i­mal. The smell of mud, of primeval mud, by Jove! was in my nos­trils, the high still­ness of primeval for­est was be­fore my eyes; there were shiny patches on the black creek. The moon had spread over ev­ery­thing a thin layer of sil­ver—over the rank grass, over the mud, upon the wall of mat­ted veg­e­ta­tion stand­ing higher than the wall of a tem­ple, over the great river I could see through a som­bre gap glit­ter­ing, glit­ter­ing, as it flowed broadly by with­out a mur­mur. All this was great, ex­pec­tant, mute, while the man jab­bered about him­self. I won­dered whether the still­ness on the face of the im­men­sity look­ing at us two were meant as an ap­peal or as a men­ace. What were we who had strayed in here? Could we han­dle that dumb thing, or would it han­dle us? I felt how big, how con­found­edly big, was that thing that couldn’t talk, and per­haps was deaf as well. What was in there? I could see a lit­tle ivory com­ing out from there, and I had heard Mr. Kurtz was in there. I had heard enough about it, too—God knows! Yet some­how it didn’t bring any im­age with it—no more than if I had been told an an­gel or a fiend was in there. I be­lieved it in the same way one of you might be­lieve there are in­hab­i­tants in the planet Mars. I knew once a Scotch sail­maker who was cer­tain, dead sure, there were peo­ple in Mars. If you asked him for some idea how they looked and be­haved, he would get shy and mut­ter some­thing about ‘walk­ing on all-fours.’ If you as much as smiled, he would—though a man of sixty—of­fer to fight you. I would not have gone so far as to fight for Kurtz, but I went for him near enough to a lie. You know I hate, de­test, and can’t bear a lie, not be­cause I am straighter than the rest of us, but sim­ply be­cause it ap­palls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mor­tal­ity in lies—which is ex­actly what I hate and de­test in the world—what I want to for­get. It makes me mis­er­able and sick, like bit­ing some­thing rot­ten would do. Tem­per­a­ment, I sup­pose. Well, I went near enough to it by let­ting the young fool there be­lieve any­thing he liked to imag­ine as to my in­flu­ence in Europe. I be­came in an in­stant as much of a pre­tence as the rest of the be­witched pil­grims. This sim­ply be­cause I had a no­tion it some­how would be of help to that Kurtz whom at the time I did not see—you un­der­stand. He was just a word for me. I did not see the man in the name any more than you do. Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see any­thing? It seems to me I am try­ing to tell you a dream—mak­ing a vain at­tempt, be­cause no re­la­tion of a dream can con­vey the dream-sen­sa­tion, that com­min­gling of ab­sur­dity, sur­prise, and be­wil­der­ment in a tremor of strug­gling re­volt, that no­tion of be­ing cap­tured by the in­cred­i­ble which is of the very essence of dreams. …”

He was silent for a while.

“… No, it is im­pos­si­ble; it is im­pos­si­ble to con­vey the life-sen­sa­tion of any given epoch of one’s ex­is­tence—that which makes its truth, its mean­ing—its sub­tle and pen­e­trat­ing essence. It is im­pos­si­ble. We live, as we dream—alone. …”

He paused again as if re­flect­ing, then added:

“Of course in this you fel­lows see more than I could then. You see me, whom you know. …”

It had be­come so pitch dark that we lis­ten­ers could hardly see one an­other. For a long time al­ready he, sit­ting apart, had been no more to us than a voice. There was not a word from any­body. The oth­ers might have been asleep, but I was awake. I lis­tened, I lis­tened on the watch for the sen­tence, for the word, that would give me the clue to the faint un­easi­ness in­spired by this nar­ra­tive that seemed to shape it­self with­out hu­man lips in the heavy night-air of the river.

“… Yes—I let him run on,” Mar­low be­gan again, “and think what he pleased about the pow­ers that were be­hind me. I did! And there was noth­ing be­hind me! There was noth­ing but that wretched, old, man­gled steam­boat I was lean­ing against, while he talked flu­ently about ‘the ne­ces­sity for ev­ery man to get on.’ ‘And when one comes out here, you con­ceive, it is not to gaze at the moon.’ Mr. Kurtz was a ‘uni­ver­sal ge­nius,’ but even a ge­nius would find it eas­ier to work with ‘ad­e­quate tools—in­tel­li­gent men.’ He did not make bricks—why, there was a phys­i­cal im­pos­si­bil­ity in the way—as I was well aware; and if he did sec­re­tar­ial work for the man­ager, it was be­cause ‘no sen­si­ble man re­jects wan­tonly the con­fi­dence of his su­pe­ri­ors.’ Did I see it? I saw it. What more did I want? What I re­ally wanted was riv­ets, by heaven! Rivets. To get on with the work—to stop the hole. Rivets I wanted. There were cases of them down at the coast—cases—piled up—burst—split! You kicked a loose rivet at ev­ery sec­ond step in that sta­tion-yard on the hill­side. Rivets had rolled into the grove of death. You could fill your pock­ets with riv­ets for the trou­ble of stoop­ing down—and there wasn’t one rivet to be found where it was wanted. We had plates that would do, but noth­ing to fas­ten them with. And ev­ery week the mes­sen­ger, a long ne­gro, let­ter-bag on shoul­der and staff in hand, left our sta­tion for the coast. And sev­eral times a week a coast car­a­van came in with trade goods—ghastly glazed cal­ico that made you shud­der only to look at it, glass beads value about a penny a quart, con­founded spot­ted cot­ton hand­ker­chiefs. And no riv­ets. Three car­ri­ers could have brought all that was wanted to set that steam­boat afloat.

“He was be­com­ing con­fi­den­tial now, but I fancy my un­re­spon­sive at­ti­tude must have ex­as­per­ated him at last, for he judged it nec­es­sary to in­form me he feared nei­ther God nor devil, let alone any mere man. I said I could see that very well, but what I wanted was a cer­tain quan­tity of riv­ets—and riv­ets were what re­ally Mr. Kurtz wanted, if he had only known it. Now let­ters went to the coast ev­ery week. … ‘My dear sir,’ he cried, ‘I write from dic­ta­tion.’ I de­manded riv­ets. There was a way—for an in­tel­li­gent man. He changed his man­ner; be­came very cold, and sud­denly be­gan to talk about a hip­popota­mus; won­dered whether sleep­ing on board the steamer (I stuck to my sal­vage night and day) I wasn’t dis­turbed. There was an old hippo that had the bad habit of get­ting out on the bank and roam­ing at night over the sta­tion grounds. The pil­grims used to turn out in a body and empty ev­ery ri­fle they could lay hands on at him. Some even had sat up o’ nights for him. All this en­ergy was wasted, though. ‘That an­i­mal has a charmed life,’ he said; ‘but you can say this only of brutes in this coun­try. No man—you ap­pre­hend me?—no man here bears a charmed life.’ He stood there for a mo­ment in the moon­light with his del­i­cate hooked nose set a lit­tle askew, and his mica eyes glit­ter­ing with­out a wink, then, with a curt Good­night, 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, tin­pot steam­boat. I clam­bered on board. She rang un­der my feet like an empty Hunt­ley & Palmer bis­cuit-tin kicked along a gut­ter; she was noth­ing so solid in make, and rather less pretty in shape, but I had ex­pended enough hard work on her to make me love her. No in­flu­en­tial friend would have served me bet­ter. She had given me a chance to come out a bit—to find out what I could do. No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work—the chance to find your­self. Your own re­al­ity—for your­self, not for oth­ers—what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it re­ally means.

“I was not sur­prised to see some­body sit­ting aft, on the deck, with his legs dan­gling over the mud. You see I rather chummed with the few me­chan­ics there were in that sta­tion, whom the other pil­grims nat­u­rally de­spised—on ac­count of their im­per­fect man­ners, I sup­pose. This was the fore­man—a boil­er­maker by trade—a good worker. He was a lank, bony, yel­low-faced man, with big in­tense eyes. His as­pect was wor­ried, and his head was as bald as the palm of my hand; but his hair in fall­ing seemed to have stuck to his chin, and had pros­pered in the new lo­cal­ity, for his beard hung down to his waist. He was a wid­ower with six young chil­dren (he had left them in charge of a sis­ter of his to come out there), and the pas­sion of his life was pi­geon-fly­ing. He was an en­thu­si­ast and a con­nois­seur. He would rave about pi­geons. After work hours he used some­times to come over from his hut for a talk about his chil­dren and his pi­geons; at work, when he had to crawl in the mud un­der the bot­tom of the steam­boat, he would tie up that beard of his in a kind of white servi­ette he brought for the pur­pose. It had loops to go over his ears. In the evening he could be seen squat­ted on the bank rins­ing that wrap­per in the creek with great care, then spread­ing it solemnly on a bush to dry.

“I slapped him on the back and shouted, ‘We shall have riv­ets!’ He scram­bled to his feet ex­claim­ing, ‘No! Rivets!’ as though he couldn’t be­lieve his ears. Then in a low voice, ‘You … eh?’ I don’t know why we be­haved like lu­natics. I put my fin­ger to the side of my nose and nod­ded mys­te­ri­ously. ‘Good for you!’ he cried, snapped his fin­gers above his head, lift­ing one foot. I tried a jig. We ca­pered on the iron deck. A fright­ful clat­ter came out of that hulk, and the vir­gin for­est on the other bank of the creek sent it back in a thun­der­ing roll upon the sleep­ing sta­tion. It must have made some of the pil­grims sit up in their hov­els. A dark fig­ure ob­scured the lighted door­way of the man­ager’s hut, van­ished, then, a sec­ond or so af­ter, the door­way it­self van­ished, too. We stopped, and the si­lence driven away by the stamp­ing of our feet flowed back again from the re­cesses of the land. The great wall of veg­e­ta­tion, an ex­u­ber­ant and en­tan­gled mass of trunks, branches, leaves, boughs, fes­toons, mo­tion­less in the moon­light, was like a ri­ot­ing in­va­sion of sound­less life, a rolling wave of plants, piled up, crested, ready to top­ple over the creek, to sweep ev­ery lit­tle man of us out of his lit­tle ex­is­tence. And it moved not. A dead­ened burst of mighty splashes and snorts reached us from afar, as though an ic­thyosaurus had been tak­ing a bath of glit­ter in the great river. ‘After all,’ said the boil­er­maker in a rea­son­able tone, ‘why shouldn’t we get the riv­ets?’ Why not, in­deed! I did not know of any rea­son why we shouldn’t. ‘They’ll come in three weeks,’ I said con­fi­dently.

“But they didn’t. In­stead of riv­ets there came an in­va­sion, an in­flic­tion, a vis­i­ta­tion. It came in sec­tions dur­ing the next three weeks, each sec­tion headed by a don­key car­ry­ing a white man in new clothes and tan shoes, bow­ing from that el­e­va­tion right and left to the im­pressed pil­grims. A quar­rel­some band of foot­sore sulky nig­gers trod on the heels of the don­key; a lot of tents, camp­stools, tin boxes, white cases, brown bales would be shot down in the court­yard, and the air of mys­tery would deepen a lit­tle over the mud­dle of the sta­tion. Five such in­stal­ments came, with their ab­surd air of dis­or­derly flight with the loot of in­nu­mer­able out­fit shops and pro­vi­sion stores, that, one would think, they were lug­ging, af­ter a raid, into the wilder­ness for eq­ui­table di­vi­sion. It was an in­ex­tri­ca­ble mess of things de­cent in them­selves but that hu­man folly made look like the spoils of thiev­ing.

“This de­voted band called it­self the El­do­rado Ex­plor­ing Ex­pe­di­tion, and I be­lieve they were sworn to se­crecy. Their talk, how­ever, was the talk of sor­did buc­ca­neers: it was reck­less with­out hardi­hood, greedy with­out au­dac­ity, and cruel with­out courage; there was not an atom of fore­sight or of se­ri­ous in­ten­tion in the whole batch of them, and they did not seem aware these things are wanted for the work of the world. To tear trea­sure out of the bow­els of the land was their de­sire, with no more moral pur­pose at the back of it than there is in bur­glars break­ing into a safe. Who paid the ex­penses of the no­ble en­ter­prise I don’t know; but the un­cle of our man­ager was leader of that lot.

“In ex­te­rior he re­sem­bled a butcher in a poor neigh­bour­hood, and his eyes had a look of sleepy cun­ning. He car­ried his fat paunch with os­ten­ta­tion on his short legs, and dur­ing the time his gang in­fested the sta­tion spoke to no one but his nephew. You could see these two roam­ing about all day long with their heads close to­gether in an ev­er­last­ing con­fab.

“I had given up wor­ry­ing my­self about the riv­ets. One’s ca­pac­ity for that kind of folly is more lim­ited than you would sup­pose. I said Hang!—and let things slide. I had plenty of time for med­i­ta­tion, and now and then I would give some thought to Kurtz. I wasn’t very in­ter­ested in him. No. Still, I was cu­ri­ous to see whether this man, who had come out equipped with moral ideas of some sort, would climb to the top af­ter all and how he would set about his work when there.”

II

“One evening as I was ly­ing flat on the deck of my steam­boat, I heard voices ap­proach­ing—and there were the nephew and the un­cle strolling along the bank. I laid my head on my arm again, and had nearly lost my­self in a doze, when some­body said in my ear, as it were: ‘I am as harm­less as a lit­tle child, but I don’t like to be dic­tated to. Am I the man­ager—or am I not? I was or­dered to send him there. It’s in­cred­i­ble.’ … I be­came aware that the two were stand­ing on the shore along­side the forepart of the steam­boat, just be­low my head. I did not move; it did not oc­cur to me to move: I was sleepy. ‘It is un­pleas­ant,’ grunted the un­cle. ‘He has asked the Ad­min­is­tra­tion to be sent there,’ said the other, ‘with the idea of show­ing what he could do; and I was in­structed ac­cord­ingly. Look at the in­flu­ence that man must have. Is it not fright­ful?’ They both agreed it was fright­ful, then made sev­eral bizarre re­marks: ‘Make rain and fine weather—one man—the Coun­cil—by the nose’—bits of ab­surd sen­tences that got the bet­ter of my drowsi­ness, so that I had pretty near the whole of my wits about me when the un­cle said, ‘The cli­mate may do away with this dif­fi­culty for you. Is he alone there?’ ‘Yes,’ an­swered the man­ager; ‘he sent his as­sis­tant down the river with a note to me in these terms: “Clear this poor devil out of the coun­try, and don’t bother send­ing more of that sort. I had rather be alone than have the kind of men you can dis­pose of with me.” It was more than a year ago. Can you imag­ine such im­pu­dence!’ ‘Any­thing since then?’ asked the other hoarsely. ‘Ivory,’ jerked the nephew; ‘lots of it—prime sort—lots—most an­noy­ing, from him.’ ‘And with that?’ ques­tioned the heavy rum­ble. ‘In­voice,’ was the re­ply fired out, so to speak. Then si­lence. They had been talk­ing about Kurtz.

“I was broad awake by this time, but, ly­ing per­fectly at ease, re­mained still, hav­ing no in­duce­ment to change my po­si­tion. ‘How did that ivory come all this way?’ growled the el­der man, who seemed very vexed. The other ex­plained that it had come with a fleet of ca­noes in charge of an English half-caste clerk Kurtz had with him; that Kurtz had ap­par­ently in­tended to re­turn him­self, the sta­tion be­ing by that time bare of goods and stores, but af­ter com­ing three hun­dred miles, had sud­denly de­cided to go back, which he started to do alone in a small dugout with four pad­dlers, leav­ing the half-caste to con­tinue down the river with the ivory. The two fel­lows there seemed as­tounded at any­body at­tempt­ing such a thing. They were at a loss for an ad­e­quate mo­tive. As to me, I seemed to see Kurtz for the first time. It was a dis­tinct glimpse: the dugout, four pad­dling sav­ages, and the lone white man turn­ing his back sud­denly on the head­quar­ters, on re­lief, on thoughts of home—per­haps; set­ting his face to­wards the depths of the wilder­ness, to­wards his empty and des­o­late sta­tion. I did not know the mo­tive. Per­haps he was just sim­ply a fine fel­low who stuck to his work for its own sake. His name, you un­der­stand, had not been pro­nounced once. He was ‘that man.’ The half-caste, who, as far as I could see, had con­ducted a dif­fi­cult trip with great pru­dence and pluck, was in­vari­ably al­luded to as ‘that scoundrel.’ The ‘scoundrel’ had re­ported that the ‘man’ had been very ill—had re­cov­ered im­per­fectly. … The two be­low me moved away then a few paces, and strolled back and forth at some lit­tle dis­tance. I heard: ‘Mil­i­tary post—doc­tor—two hun­dred miles—quite alone now—un­avoid­able de­lays—nine months—no news—strange ru­mours.’ They ap­proached again, just as the man­ager was say­ing, ‘No one, as far as I know, un­less a species of wan­der­ing trader—a pesti­len­tial fel­low, snap­ping ivory from the na­tives.’ Who was it they were talk­ing about now? I gath­ered in snatches that this was some man sup­posed to be in Kurtz’s dis­trict, and of whom the man­ager did not ap­prove. ‘We will not be free from un­fair com­pe­ti­tion till one of these fel­lows is hanged for an ex­am­ple,’ he said. ‘Cer­tainly,’ grunted the other; ‘get him hanged! Why not? Any­thing—any­thing can be done in this coun­try. That’s what I say; no­body here, you un­der­stand, here, can en­dan­ger your po­si­tion. And why? You stand the cli­mate—you out­last them all. The dan­ger is in Europe; but there be­fore I left I took care to—’ They moved off and whis­pered, then their voices rose again. ‘The ex­tra­or­di­nary se­ries of de­lays is not my fault. I did my best.’ The fat man sighed. ‘Very sad.’ ‘And the pes­tif­er­ous ab­sur­dity of his talk,’ con­tin­ued the other; ‘he both­ered me enough when he was here. “Each sta­tion should be like a bea­con on the road to­wards bet­ter things, a cen­tre for trade of course, but also for hu­man­iz­ing, im­prov­ing, in­struct­ing.” Con­ceive you—that ass! And he wants to be man­ager! No, it’s—’ Here he got choked by ex­ces­sive in­dig­na­tion, and I lifted my head the least bit. I was sur­prised to see how near they were—right un­der me. I could have spat upon their hats. They were look­ing on the ground, ab­sorbed in thought. The man­ager was switch­ing his leg with a slen­der twig: his saga­cious rel­a­tive lifted his head. ‘You have been well since you came out this time?’ he asked. The other gave a start. ‘Who? I? Oh! Like a charm—like a charm. But the rest—oh, my good­ness! All sick. They die so quick, too, that I haven’t the time to send them out of the coun­try—it’s in­cred­i­ble!’ ‘Hm’m. Just so,’ grunted the un­cle. ‘Ah! my boy, trust to this—I say, trust to this.’ I saw him ex­tend his short flip­per of an arm for a ges­ture that took in the for­est, the creek, the mud, the river—seemed to beckon with a dis­hon­our­ing flour­ish be­fore the sun­lit face of the land a treach­er­ous ap­peal to the lurk­ing death, to the hid­den evil, to the pro­found dark­ness of its heart. It was so star­tling that I leaped to my feet and looked back at the edge of the for­est, as though I had ex­pected an an­swer of some sort to that black dis­play of con­fi­dence. You know the fool­ish no­tions that come to one some­times. The high still­ness con­fronted these two fig­ures with its omi­nous pa­tience, wait­ing for the pass­ing away of a fan­tas­tic in­va­sion.

“They swore aloud to­gether—out of sheer fright, I be­lieve—then pre­tend­ing not to know any­thing of my ex­is­tence, turned back to the sta­tion. The sun was low; and lean­ing for­ward side by side, they seemed to be tug­ging painfully up­hill their two ridicu­lous shad­ows of un­equal length, that trailed be­hind them slowly over the tall grass with­out bend­ing a sin­gle blade.

“In a few days the El­do­rado Ex­pe­di­tion went into the pa­tient wilder­ness, that closed upon it as the sea closes over a diver. Long af­ter­wards the news came that all the don­keys were dead. I know noth­ing as to the fate of the less valu­able an­i­mals. They, no doubt, like the rest of us, found what they de­served. I did not in­quire. I was then rather ex­cited at the prospect of meet­ing Kurtz very soon. When I say very soon I mean it com­par­a­tively. It was just two months from the day we left the creek when we came to the bank be­low Kurtz’s sta­tion.

“Go­ing up that river was like trav­el­ing back to the ear­li­est be­gin­nings of the world, when veg­e­ta­tion ri­oted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great si­lence, an im­pen­e­tra­ble for­est. The air was warm, thick, heavy, slug­gish. There was no joy in the bril­liance of sun­shine. The long stretches of the wa­ter­way ran on, de­serted, into the gloom of over­shad­owed dis­tances. On sil­very sand­banks hip­pos and al­li­ga­tors sunned them­selves side by side. The broad­en­ing wa­ters flowed through a mob of wooded is­lands; you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, try­ing to find the chan­nel, till you thought your­self be­witched and cut off for­ever 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 tin­pot steam­boat and drowned all the pil­grims; I had to keep a look­out for the signs of dead wood we could cut up in the night for next day’s steam­ing. When you have to at­tend to things of that sort, to the mere in­ci­dents of the sur­face, the re­al­ity—the re­al­ity, I tell you—fades. The in­ner truth is hid­den—luck­ily, luck­ily. But I felt it all the same; I felt of­ten its mys­te­ri­ous still­ness watch­ing me at my mon­key tricks, just as it watches you fel­lows per­form­ing on your re­spec­tive tightropes for—what is it? half-a-crown a tum­ble—”

“Try to be civil, Mar­low,” growled a voice, and I knew there was at least one lis­tener awake be­sides my­self.

“I beg your par­don. I for­got the heartache which makes up the rest of the price. And in­deed what does the price mat­ter, if the trick be well done? You do your tricks very well. And I didn’t do badly ei­ther, since I man­aged not to sink that steam­boat on my first trip. It’s a won­der to me yet. Imag­ine a blind­folded man set to drive a van over a bad road. I sweated and shiv­ered over that busi­ness con­sid­er­ably, I can tell you. After all, for a sea­man, to scrape the bot­tom of the thing that’s sup­posed to float all the time un­der his care is the un­par­don­able sin. No one may know of it, but you never for­get the thump—eh? A blow on the very heart. You re­mem­ber it, you dream of it, you wake up at night and think of it—years af­ter—and go hot and cold all over. I don’t pre­tend to say that steam­boat floated all the time. More than once she had to wade for a bit, with twenty can­ni­bals splash­ing around and push­ing. We had en­listed some of these chaps on the way for a crew. Fine fel­lows—can­ni­bals—in their place. They were men one could work with, and I am grate­ful to them. And, af­ter all, they did not eat each other be­fore my face: they had brought along a pro­vi­sion of hippo-meat which went rot­ten, and made the mys­tery of the wilder­ness stink in my nos­trils. Phoo! I can sniff it now. I had the man­ager on board and three or four pil­grims with their staves—all com­plete. Some­times we came upon a sta­tion close by the bank, cling­ing to the skirts of the un­known, and the white men rush­ing out of a tum­ble­down hovel, with great ges­tures of joy and sur­prise and wel­come, seemed very strange—had the ap­pear­ance of be­ing held there cap­tive by a spell. The word ivory would ring in the air for a while—and on we went again into the si­lence, along empty reaches, round the still bends, be­tween the high walls of our wind­ing way, re­ver­ber­at­ing in hol­low claps the pon­der­ous beat of the stern-wheel. Trees, trees, mil­lions of trees, mas­sive, im­mense, run­ning up high; and at their foot, hug­ging the bank against the stream, crept the lit­tle be­grimed steam­boat, like a slug­gish bee­tle crawl­ing on the floor of a lofty por­tico. It made you feel very small, very lost, and yet it was not al­to­gether de­press­ing, that feel­ing. After all, if you were small, the grimy bee­tle crawled on—which was just what you wanted it to do. Where the pil­grims imag­ined it crawled to I don’t know. To some place where they ex­pected to get some­thing. I bet! For me it crawled to­wards Kurtz—ex­clu­sively; but when the steam-pipes started leak­ing we crawled very slow. The reaches opened be­fore us and closed be­hind, as if the for­est had stepped leisurely across the wa­ter to bar the way for our re­turn. We pen­e­trated deeper and deeper into the heart of dark­ness. It was very quiet there. At night some­times the roll of drums be­hind the cur­tain of trees would run up the river and re­main sus­tained faintly, as if hov­er­ing in the air high over our heads, till the first break of day. Whether it meant war, peace, or prayer we could not tell. The dawns were her­alded by the de­scent of a chill still­ness; the wood­cut­ters slept, their fires burned low; the snap­ping of a twig would make you start. We were wan­der­ers on a pre­his­toric earth, on an earth that wore the as­pect of an un­known planet. We could have fan­cied our­selves the first of men tak­ing pos­ses­sion of an ac­cursed in­her­i­tance, to be sub­dued at the cost of pro­found an­guish and of ex­ces­sive toil. But sud­denly, as we strug­gled round a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clap­ping of feet stamp­ing, of bod­ies sway­ing, of eyes rolling, un­der the droop of heavy and mo­tion­less fo­liage. The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and in­com­pre­hen­si­ble frenzy. The pre­his­toric man was curs­ing us, pray­ing to us, wel­com­ing us—who could tell? We were cut off from the com­pre­hen­sion of our sur­round­ings; we glided past like phan­toms, won­der­ing and se­cretly ap­palled, as sane men would be be­fore an en­thu­si­as­tic out­break in a mad­house. We could not un­der­stand be­cause we were too far and could not re­mem­ber be­cause we were trav­el­ling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leav­ing hardly a sign—and no mem­o­ries.

“The earth seemed un­earthly. We are ac­cus­tomed to look upon the shack­led form of a con­quered mon­ster, but there—there you could look at a thing mon­strous and free. It was un­earthly, and the men were—No, they were not in­hu­man. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—this sus­pi­cion of their not be­ing in­hu­man. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made hor­rid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their hu­man­ity—like yours—the thought of your re­mote kin­ship with this wild and pas­sion­ate up­roar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would ad­mit to your­self that there was in you just the faintest trace of a re­sponse to the ter­ri­ble frank­ness of that noise, a dim sus­pi­cion of there be­ing a mean­ing in it which you—you so re­mote from the night of first ages—could com­pre­hend. And why not? The mind of man is ca­pa­ble of any­thing—be­cause ev­ery­thing is in it, all the past as well as all the fu­ture. What was there af­ter all? Joy, fear, sor­row, de­vo­tion, val­our, rage—who can tell?—but truth—truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and shud­der—the man knows, and can look on with­out a wink. But he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore. He must meet that truth with his own true stuff—with his own in­born strength. Prin­ci­ples won’t do. Ac­qui­si­tions, clothes, pretty rags—rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No; you want a de­lib­er­ate be­lief. An ap­peal to me in this fiendish row—is there? Very well; I hear; I ad­mit, but I have a voice, too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that can­not be si­lenced. Of course, a fool, what with sheer fright and fine sen­ti­ments, is al­ways safe. Who’s that grunt­ing? You won­der I didn’t go ashore for a howl and a dance? Well, no—I didn’t. Fine sen­ti­ments, you say? Fine sen­ti­ments, be hanged! I had no time. I had to mess about with white-lead and strips of woolen blan­ket help­ing to put ban­dages on those leaky steam-pipes—I tell you. I had to watch the steer­ing, and cir­cum­vent those snags, and get the tin­pot along by hook or by crook. There was sur­face-truth enough in these things to save a wiser man. And be­tween whiles I had to look af­ter the sav­age who was fire­man. He was an im­proved spec­i­men; he could fire up a ver­ti­cal boiler. He was there be­low me, and, upon my word, to look at him was as ed­i­fy­ing as see­ing a dog in a par­ody of breeches and a feather hat, walk­ing on his hind-legs. A few months of train­ing had done for that re­ally fine chap. He squinted at the steam-gauge and at the wa­ter-gauge with an ev­i­dent ef­fort of in­tre­pid­ity—and he had filed teeth, too, the poor devil, and the wool of his pate shaved into queer pat­terns, and three or­na­men­tal scars on each of his cheeks. He ought to have been clap­ping his hands and stamp­ing his feet on the bank, in­stead of which he was hard at work, a thrall to strange witch­craft, full of im­prov­ing knowl­edge. He was use­ful be­cause he had been in­structed; and what he knew was this—that should the wa­ter in that trans­par­ent thing dis­ap­pear, the evil spirit in­side the boiler would get an­gry through the great­ness of his thirst, and take a ter­ri­ble vengeance. So he sweated and fired up and watched the glass fear­fully (with an im­promptu charm, made of rags, tied to his arm, and a piece of pol­ished bone, as big as a watch, stuck flat­ways through his lower lip), while the wooded banks slipped past us slowly, the short noise was left be­hind, the in­ter­minable miles of si­lence—and we crept on, to­wards Kurtz. But the snags were thick, the wa­ter was treach­er­ous and shal­low, the boiler seemed in­deed to have a sulky devil in it, and thus nei­ther that fire­man nor I had any time to peer into our creepy thoughts.

“Some fifty miles be­low the In­ner Sta­tion we came upon a hut of reeds, an in­clined and melan­choly pole, with the un­rec­og­niz­able tat­ters of what had been a flag of some sort fly­ing from it, and a neatly stacked wood­pile. This was un­ex­pected. We came to the bank, and on the stack of fire­wood found a flat piece of board with some faded pen­cil-writ­ing on it. When de­ci­phered it said: ‘Wood for you. Hurry up. Ap­proach cau­tiously.’ There was a sig­na­ture, but it was il­leg­i­ble—not Kurtz—a much longer word. ‘Hurry up.’ Where? Up the river? ‘Ap­proach cau­tiously.’ We had not done so. But the warn­ing could not have been meant for the place where it could be only found af­ter ap­proach. Some­thing was wrong above. But what—and how much? That was the ques­tion. We com­mented ad­versely upon the im­be­cil­ity of that tele­graphic style. The bush around said noth­ing, and would not let us look very far, ei­ther. A torn cur­tain of red twill hung in the door­way of the hut, and flapped sadly in our faces. The dwelling was dis­man­tled; but we could see a white man had lived there not very long ago. There re­mained a rude ta­ble—a plank on two posts; a heap of rub­bish re­posed in a dark cor­ner, and by the door I picked up a book. It had lost its cov­ers, and the pages had been thumbed into a state of ex­tremely dirty soft­ness; but the back had been lov­ingly stitched afresh with white cot­ton thread, which looked clean yet. It was an ex­tra­or­di­nary find. Its ti­tle was, An In­quiry into some Points of Sea­man­ship, by a man Towser, Tow­son—some such name—Master in his Majesty’s Navy. The mat­ter looked dreary read­ing enough, with il­lus­tra­tive di­a­grams and re­pul­sive ta­bles of fig­ures, and the copy was sixty years old. I han­dled this amaz­ing an­tiq­uity with the great­est pos­si­ble ten­der­ness, lest it should dis­solve in my hands. Within, Tow­son or Towser was in­quir­ing earnestly into the break­ing strain of ships’ chains and tackle, and other such mat­ters. Not a very en­thralling book; but at the first glance you could see there a sin­gle­ness of in­ten­tion, an hon­est con­cern for the right way of go­ing to work, which made these hum­ble pages, thought out so many years ago, lu­mi­nous with an­other than a pro­fes­sional light. The sim­ple old sailor, with his talk of chains and pur­chases, made me for­get the jun­gle and the pil­grims in a de­li­cious sen­sa­tion of hav­ing come upon some­thing un­mis­tak­ably real. Such a book be­ing there was won­der­ful enough; but still more as­tound­ing were the notes pen­cilled in the mar­gin, and plainly re­fer­ring to the text. I couldn’t be­lieve my eyes! They were in ci­pher! Yes, it looked like ci­pher. Fancy a man lug­ging with him a book of that de­scrip­tion into this nowhere and study­ing it—and mak­ing notes—in ci­pher at that! It was an ex­trav­a­gant mys­tery.

“I had been dimly aware for some time of a wor­ry­ing noise, and when I lifted my eyes I saw the wood­pile was gone, and the man­ager, aided by all the pil­grims, was shout­ing at me from the river­side. I slipped the book into my pocket. I as­sure you to leave off read­ing was like tear­ing my­self away from the shel­ter of an old and solid friend­ship.

“I started the lame en­gine ahead. ‘It must be this mis­er­able trader—this in­truder,’ ex­claimed the man­ager, look­ing back malev­o­lently at the place we had left. ‘He must be English,’ I said. ‘It will not save him from get­ting into trou­ble if he is not care­ful,’ mut­tered the man­ager darkly. I ob­served with as­sumed in­no­cence that no man was safe from trou­ble in this world.

“The cur­rent was more rapid now, the steamer seemed at her last gasp, the stern-wheel flopped lan­guidly, and I caught my­self lis­ten­ing on tip­toe for the next beat of the boat, for in sober truth I ex­pected the wretched thing to give up ev­ery mo­ment. It was like watch­ing the last flick­ers of a life. But still we crawled. Some­times I would pick out a tree a lit­tle way ahead to mea­sure our progress to­wards Kurtz by, but I lost it in­vari­ably be­fore we got abreast. To keep the eyes so long on one thing was too much for hu­man pa­tience. The man­ager dis­played a beau­ti­ful res­ig­na­tion. I fret­ted and fumed and took to ar­gu­ing with my­self whether or no I would talk openly with Kurtz; but be­fore I could come to any con­clu­sion it oc­curred to me that my speech or my si­lence, in­deed any ac­tion of mine, would be a mere fu­til­ity. What did it mat­ter what any­one knew or ig­nored? What did it mat­ter who was man­ager? One gets some­times such a flash of in­sight. The es­sen­tials of this af­fair lay deep un­der the sur­face, be­yond my reach, and be­yond my power of med­dling.

“Towards the evening of the sec­ond day we judged our­selves about eight miles from Kurtz’s sta­tion. I wanted to push on; but the man­ager looked grave, and told me the nav­i­ga­tion up there was so dan­ger­ous that it would be ad­vis­able, the sun be­ing very low al­ready, to wait where we were till next morn­ing. More­over, he pointed out that if the warn­ing to ap­proach cau­tiously were to be fol­lowed, we must ap­proach in day­light—not at dusk or in the dark. This was sen­si­ble enough. Eight miles meant nearly three hours’ steam­ing for us, and I could also see sus­pi­cious rip­ples at the up­per end of the reach. Nev­er­the­less, I was an­noyed be­yond ex­pres­sion at the de­lay, and most un­rea­son­ably, too, since one night more could not mat­ter much af­ter so many months. As we had plenty of wood, and cau­tion was the word, I brought up in the mid­dle of the stream. The reach was nar­row, straight, with high sides like a rail­way cut­ting. The dusk came glid­ing into it long be­fore the sun had set. The cur­rent ran smooth and swift, but a dumb im­mo­bil­ity sat on the banks. The liv­ing trees, lashed to­gether by the creep­ers and ev­ery liv­ing bush of the un­der­growth, might have been changed into stone, even to the slen­der­est twig, to the light­est leaf. It was not sleep—it seemed un­nat­u­ral, like a state of trance. Not the faintest sound of any kind could be heard. You looked on amazed, and be­gan to sus­pect your­self of be­ing deaf—then the night came sud­denly, and struck you blind as well. About three in the morn­ing some large fish leaped, and the loud splash made me jump as though a gun had been fired. When the sun rose there was a white fog, very warm and clammy, and more blind­ing than the night. It did not shift or drive; it was just there, stand­ing all round you like some­thing solid. At eight or nine, per­haps, it lifted as a shut­ter lifts. We had a glimpse of the tow­er­ing mul­ti­tude of trees, of the im­mense mat­ted jun­gle, with the blaz­ing lit­tle ball of the sun hang­ing over it—all per­fectly still—and then the white shut­ter came down again, smoothly, as if slid­ing in greased grooves. I or­dered the chain, which we had be­gun to heave in, to be paid out again. Be­fore it stopped run­ning with a muf­fled rat­tle, a cry, a very loud cry, as of in­fi­nite des­o­la­tion, soared slowly in the opaque air. It ceased. A com­plain­ing clam­our, mod­u­lated in sav­age dis­cords, filled our ears. The sheer un­ex­pect­ed­ness of it made my hair stir un­der my cap. I don’t know how it struck the oth­ers: to me it seemed as though the mist it­self had screamed, so sud­denly, and ap­par­ently from all sides at once, did this tu­mul­tuous and mourn­ful up­roar arise. It cul­mi­nated in a hur­ried out­break of al­most in­tol­er­a­bly ex­ces­sive shriek­ing, which stopped short, leav­ing us stiff­ened in a va­ri­ety of silly at­ti­tudes, and ob­sti­nately lis­ten­ing to the nearly as ap­palling and ex­ces­sive si­lence. ‘Good God! What is the mean­ing—’ stam­mered at my el­bow one of the pil­grims—a lit­tle fat man, with sandy hair and red whiskers, who wore sidespring boots, and pink py­ja­mas tucked into his socks. Two oth­ers re­mained open-mouthed a while minute, then dashed into the lit­tle cabin, to rush out in­con­ti­nently and stand dart­ing scared glances, with Winch­esters at ‘ready’ in their hands. What we could see was just the steamer we were on, her out­lines blurred as though she had been on the point of dis­solv­ing, and a misty strip of wa­ter, per­haps two feet broad, around her—and that was all. The rest of the world was nowhere, as far as our eyes and ears were con­cerned. Just nowhere. Gone, dis­ap­peared; swept off with­out leav­ing a whis­per or a shadow be­hind.

“I went for­ward, and or­dered the chain to be hauled in short, so as to be ready to trip the an­chor and move the steam­boat at once if nec­es­sary. ‘Will they at­tack?’ whis­pered an awed voice. ‘We will be all butchered in this fog,’ mur­mured an­other. The faces twitched with the strain, the hands trem­bled slightly, the eyes for­got to wink. It was very cu­ri­ous to see the con­trast of ex­pres­sions of the white men and of the black fel­lows of our crew, who were as much strangers to that part of the river as we, though their homes were only eight hun­dred miles away. The whites, of course greatly dis­com­posed, had be­sides a cu­ri­ous look of be­ing painfully shocked by such an out­ra­geous row. The oth­ers had an alert, nat­u­rally in­ter­ested ex­pres­sion; but their faces were es­sen­tially quiet, even those of the one or two who grinned as they hauled at the chain. Sev­eral ex­changed short, grunt­ing phrases, which seemed to set­tle the mat­ter to their sat­is­fac­tion. Their head­man, a young, broad-chested black, se­verely draped in dark-blue fringed cloths, with fierce nos­trils and his hair all done up art­fully in oily ringlets, stood near me. ‘Aha!’ I said, just for good fel­low­ship’s sake. ‘Catch ’im,’ he snapped, with a blood­shot widen­ing of his eyes and a flash of sharp teeth—‘catch ’im. Give ’im to us.’ ‘To you, eh?’ I asked; ‘what would you do with them?’ ‘Eat ’im!’ he said curtly, and, lean­ing his el­bow on the rail, looked out into the fog in a dig­ni­fied and pro­foundly pen­sive at­ti­tude. I would no doubt have been prop­erly hor­ri­fied, had it not oc­curred to me that he and his chaps must be very hun­gry: that they must have been grow­ing in­creas­ingly hun­gry for at least this month past. They had been en­gaged for six months (I don’t think a sin­gle one of them had any clear idea of time, as we at the end of count­less ages have. They still be­longed to the be­gin­nings of time—had no in­her­ited ex­pe­ri­ence to teach them as it were), and of course, as long as there was a piece of pa­per writ­ten over in ac­cor­dance with some far­ci­cal law or other made down the river, it didn’t en­ter any­body’s head to trou­ble how they would live. Cer­tainly they had brought with them some rot­ten hippo-meat, which couldn’t have lasted very long, any­way, even if the pil­grims hadn’t, in the midst of a shock­ing hul­la­baloo, thrown a con­sid­er­able quan­tity of it over­board. It looked like a high­handed pro­ceed­ing; but it was re­ally a case of le­git­i­mate self-de­fence. You can’t breathe dead hippo wak­ing, sleep­ing, and eat­ing, and at the same time keep your pre­car­i­ous grip on ex­is­tence. Be­sides that, they had given them ev­ery week three pieces of brass wire, each about nine inches long; and the the­ory was they were to buy their pro­vi­sions with that cur­rency in river­side vil­lages. You can see how that worked. There were ei­ther no vil­lages, or the peo­ple were hos­tile, or the di­rec­tor, who like the rest of us fed out of tins, with an oc­ca­sional old he-goat thrown in, didn’t want to stop the steamer for some more or less re­con­dite rea­son. So, un­less they swal­lowed the wire it­self, or made loops of it to snare the fishes with, I don’t see what good their ex­trav­a­gant salary could be to them. I must say it was paid with a reg­u­lar­ity wor­thy of a large and hon­ourable trad­ing com­pany. For the rest, the only thing to eat—though it didn’t look eat­able in the least—I saw in their pos­ses­sion was a few lumps of some stuff like half-cooked dough, of a dirty laven­der colour, they kept wrapped in leaves, and now and then swal­lowed a piece of, but so small that it seemed done more for the looks of the thing than for any se­ri­ous pur­pose of sus­te­nance. Why in the name of all the gnaw­ing dev­ils of hunger they didn’t go for us—they were thirty to five—and have a good tuck-in for once, amazes me now when I think of it. They were big pow­er­ful men, with not much ca­pac­ity to weigh the con­se­quences, with courage, with strength, even yet, though their skins were no longer glossy and their mus­cles no longer hard. And I saw that some­thing re­strain­ing, one of those hu­man se­crets that baf­fle prob­a­bil­ity, had come into play there. I looked at them with a swift quick­en­ing of in­ter­est—not be­cause it oc­curred to me I might be eaten by them be­fore very long, though I own to you that just then I per­ceived—in a new light, as it were—how un­whole­some the pil­grims looked, and I hoped, yes, I pos­i­tively hoped, that my as­pect was not so—what shall I say?—so—un­ap­pe­tiz­ing: a touch of fan­tas­tic van­ity which fit­ted well with the dream-sen­sa­tion that per­vaded all my days at that time. Per­haps I had a lit­tle fever, too. One can’t live with one’s fin­ger ev­er­last­ingly on one’s pulse. I had of­ten ‘a lit­tle fever,’ or a lit­tle touch of other things—the play­ful paw-strokes of the wilder­ness, the pre­lim­i­nary tri­fling be­fore the more se­ri­ous on­slaught which came in due course. Yes; I looked at them as you would on any hu­man be­ing, with a cu­rios­ity of their im­pulses, mo­tives, ca­pac­i­ties, weak­nesses, when brought to the test of an in­ex­orable phys­i­cal ne­ces­sity. Res­traint! What pos­si­ble re­straint? Was it su­per­sti­tion, dis­gust, pa­tience, fear—or some kind of prim­i­tive hon­our? No fear can stand up to hunger, no pa­tience can wear it out, dis­gust sim­ply does not ex­ist where hunger is; and as to su­per­sti­tion, be­liefs, and what you may call prin­ci­ples, they are less than chaff in a breeze. Don’t you know the dev­ilry of lin­ger­ing star­va­tion, its ex­as­per­at­ing tor­ment, its black thoughts, its som­bre and brood­ing fe­roc­ity? Well, I do. It takes a man all his in­born strength to fight hunger prop­erly. It’s re­ally eas­ier to face be­reave­ment, dis­hon­our, and the perdi­tion of one’s soul—than this kind of pro­longed hunger. Sad, but true. And these chaps, too, had no earthly rea­son for any kind of scru­ple. Res­traint! I would just as soon have ex­pected re­straint from a hyena prowl­ing amongst the corpses of a bat­tle­field. But there was the fact fac­ing me—the fact daz­zling, to be seen, like the foam on the depths of the sea, like a rip­ple on an un­fath­omable enigma, a mys­tery greater—when I thought of it—than the cu­ri­ous, in­ex­pli­ca­ble note of des­per­ate grief in this sav­age clam­our that had swept by us on the river­bank, be­hind the blind white­ness of the fog.

“Two pil­grims were quar­relling in hur­ried whis­pers as to which bank. ‘Left.’ ‘No, no; how can you? Right, right, of course.’ ‘It is very se­ri­ous,’ said the man­ager’s voice be­hind me; ‘I would be des­o­lated if any­thing should hap­pen to Mr. Kurtz be­fore we came up.’ I looked at him, and had not the slight­est doubt he was sin­cere. He was just the kind of man who would wish to pre­serve ap­pear­ances. That was his re­straint. But when he mut­tered some­thing about go­ing on at once, I did not even take the trou­ble to an­swer him. I knew, and he knew, that it was im­pos­si­ble. Were we to let go our hold of the bot­tom, we would be ab­so­lutely in the air—in space. We wouldn’t be able to tell where we were go­ing to—whether up or down stream, or across—till we fetched against one bank or the other—and then we wouldn’t know at first which it was. Of course I made no move. I had no mind for a smashup. You couldn’t imag­ine a more deadly place for a ship­wreck. Whether we drowned at once or not, we were sure to per­ish speed­ily in one way or an­other. ‘I au­tho­rize you to take all the risks,’ he said, af­ter a short si­lence. ‘I refuse to take any,’ I said shortly; which was just the an­swer he ex­pected, though its tone might have sur­prised him. ‘Well, I must de­fer to your judg­ment. You are cap­tain,’ he said with marked ci­vil­ity. I turned my shoul­der to him in sign of my ap­pre­ci­a­tion, and looked into the fog. How long would it last? It was the most hope­less look­out. The ap­proach to this Kurtz grub­bing for ivory in the wretched bush was be­set by as many dan­gers as though he had been an en­chanted princess sleep­ing in a fab­u­lous cas­tle. ‘Will they at­tack, do you think?’ asked the man­ager, in a con­fi­den­tial tone.

“I did not think they would at­tack, for sev­eral ob­vi­ous rea­sons. The thick fog was one. If they left the bank in their ca­noes they would get lost in it, as we would be if we at­tempted to move. Still, I had also judged the jun­gle of both banks quite im­pen­e­tra­ble—and yet eyes were in it, eyes that had seen us. The river­side bushes were cer­tainly very thick; but the un­der­growth be­hind was ev­i­dently pen­e­tra­ble. How­ever, dur­ing the short lift I had seen no ca­noes any­where in the reach—cer­tainly not abreast of the steamer. But what made the idea of at­tack in­con­ceiv­able to me was the na­ture of the noise—of the cries we had heard. They had not the fierce char­ac­ter bod­ing im­me­di­ate hos­tile in­ten­tion. Un­ex­pected, wild, and vi­o­lent as they had been, they had given me an ir­re­sistible im­pres­sion of sor­row. The glimpse of the steam­boat had for some rea­son filled those sav­ages with un­re­strained grief. The dan­ger, if any, I ex­pounded, was from our prox­im­ity to a great hu­man pas­sion let loose. Even ex­treme grief may ul­ti­mately vent it­self in vi­o­lence—but more gen­er­ally takes the form of ap­a­thy. …

“You should have seen the pil­grims stare! They had no heart to grin, or even to re­vile me: but I be­lieve they thought me gone mad—with fright, maybe. I de­liv­ered a reg­u­lar lec­ture. My dear boys, it was no good both­er­ing. Keep a look­out? Well, you may guess I watched the fog for the signs of lift­ing as a cat watches a mouse; but for any­thing else our eyes were of no more use to us than if we had been buried miles deep in a heap of cot­ton-wool. It felt like it, too—chok­ing, warm, sti­fling. Be­sides, all I said, though it sounded ex­trav­a­gant, was ab­so­lutely true to fact. What we af­ter­wards al­luded to as an at­tack was re­ally an at­tempt at re­pulse. The ac­tion was very far from be­ing ag­gres­sive—it was not even de­fen­sive, in the usual sense: it was un­der­taken un­der the stress of des­per­a­tion, and in its essence was purely pro­tec­tive.

“It de­vel­oped it­self, I should say, two hours af­ter the fog lifted, and its com­mence­ment was at a spot, roughly speak­ing, about a mile and a half be­low Kurtz’s sta­tion. We had just floun­dered and flopped round a bend, when I saw an islet, a mere grassy hum­mock of bright green, in the mid­dle of the stream. It was the only thing of the kind; but as we opened the reach more, I per­ceived it was the head of a long sand­bank, or rather of a chain of shal­low patches stretch­ing down the mid­dle of the river. They were dis­coloured, just awash, and the whole lot was seen just un­der the wa­ter, ex­actly as a man’s back­bone is seen run­ning down the mid­dle of his back un­der the skin. Now, as far as I did see, I could go to the right or to the left of this. I didn’t know ei­ther chan­nel, of course. The banks looked pretty well alike, the depth ap­peared the same; but as I had been in­formed the sta­tion was on the west side, I nat­u­rally headed for the west­ern pas­sage.

“No sooner had we fairly en­tered it than I be­came aware it was much nar­rower than I had sup­posed. To the left of us there was the long un­in­ter­rupted shoal, and to the right a high, steep bank heav­ily over­grown with bushes. Above the bush the trees stood in ser­ried ranks. The twigs over­hung the cur­rent thickly, and from dis­tance to dis­tance a large limb of some tree pro­jected rigidly over the stream. It was then well on in the af­ter­noon, the face of the for­est was gloomy, and a broad strip of shadow had al­ready fallen on the wa­ter. In this shadow we steamed up—very slowly, as you may imag­ine. I sheered her well in­shore—the wa­ter be­ing deep­est near the bank, as the sound­ing-pole in­formed me.

“One of my hun­gry and for­bear­ing friends was sound­ing in the bows just be­low me. This steam­boat was ex­actly like a decked scow. On the deck, there were two lit­tle teak­wood houses, with doors and win­dows. The boiler was in the fore-end, and the ma­chin­ery right astern. Over the whole there was a light roof, sup­ported on stan­chions. The fun­nel pro­jected through that roof, and in front of the fun­nel a small cabin built of light planks served for a pi­lot­house. It con­tained a couch, two camp­stools, a loaded Mar­tini-Henry lean­ing in one cor­ner, a tiny ta­ble, and the steer­ing-wheel. It had a wide door in front and a broad shut­ter at each side. All these were al­ways thrown open, of course. I spent my days perched up there on the ex­treme fore-end of that roof, be­fore the door. At night I slept, or tried to, on the couch. An ath­letic black be­long­ing to some coast tribe and ed­u­cated by my poor pre­de­ces­sor, was the helms­man. He sported a pair of brass ear­rings, wore a blue cloth wrap­per from the waist to the an­kles, and thought all the world of him­self. He was the most un­sta­ble kind of fool I had ever seen. He steered with no end of a swag­ger while you were by; but if he lost sight of you, he be­came in­stantly the prey of an ab­ject funk, and would let that crip­ple of a steam­boat get the up­per hand of him in a minute.

“I was look­ing down at the sound­ing-pole, and feel­ing much an­noyed to see at each try a lit­tle more of it stick out of that river, when I saw my pole­man give up on the busi­ness sud­denly, and stretch him­self flat on the deck, with­out even tak­ing the trou­ble to haul his pole in. He kept hold on it though, and it trailed in the wa­ter. At the same time the fire­man, whom I could also see be­low me, sat down abruptly be­fore his fur­nace and ducked his head. I was amazed. Then I had to look at the river mighty quick, be­cause there was a snag in the fair­way. Sticks, lit­tle sticks, were fly­ing about—thick: they were whizzing be­fore my nose, drop­ping be­low me, strik­ing be­hind me against my pi­lot­house. All this time the river, the shore, the woods, were very quiet—per­fectly quiet. I could only hear the heavy splash­ing thump of the stern-wheel and the pat­ter of these things. We cleared the snag clum­sily. Ar­rows, by Jove! We were be­ing shot at! I stepped in quickly to close the shut­ter on the land­side. That fool-helms­man, his hands on the spokes, was lift­ing his knees high, stamp­ing his feet, champ­ing his mouth, like a reined-in horse. Con­found him! And we were stag­ger­ing within ten feet of the bank. I had to lean right out to swing the heavy shut­ter, and I saw a face amongst the leaves on the level with my own, look­ing at me very fierce and steady; and then sud­denly, as though a veil had been re­moved from my eyes, I made out, deep in the tan­gled gloom, naked breasts, arms, legs, glar­ing eyes—the bush was swarm­ing with hu­man limbs in move­ment, glis­ten­ing of bronze colour. The twigs shook, swayed, and rus­tled, the ar­rows flew out of them, and then the shut­ter came to. ‘Steer her straight,’ I said to the helms­man. He held his head rigid, face for­ward; but his eyes rolled, he kept on lift­ing and set­ting down his feet gen­tly, his mouth foamed a lit­tle. ‘Keep quiet!’ I said in a fury. I might just as well have or­dered a tree not to sway in the wind. I darted out. Below me there was a great scuf­fle of feet on the iron deck; con­fused ex­cla­ma­tions; a voice screamed, ‘Can you turn back?’ I caught sight of a V-shaped rip­ple on the wa­ter ahead. What? Another snag! A fusil­lade burst out un­der my feet. The pil­grims had opened with their Winch­esters, and were sim­ply squirt­ing lead into that bush. A deuce of a lot of smoke came up and drove slowly for­ward. I swore at it. Now I couldn’t see the rip­ple or the snag ei­ther. I stood in the door­way, peer­ing, and the ar­rows came in swarms. They might have been poi­soned, but they looked as though they wouldn’t kill a cat. The bush be­gan to howl. Our wood­cut­ters raised a war­like whoop; the re­port of a ri­fle just at my back deaf­ened me. I glanced over my shoul­der, and the pi­lot­house was yet full of noise and smoke when I made a dash at the wheel. The fool-nig­ger had dropped ev­ery­thing, to throw the shut­ter open and let off that Mar­tini-Henry. He stood be­fore the wide open­ing, glar­ing, and I yelled at him to come back, while I straight­ened the sud­den twist out of that steam­boat. There was no room to turn even if I had wanted to, the snag was some­where very near ahead in that con­founded smoke, there was no time to lose, so I just crowded her into the bank—right into the bank, where I knew the wa­ter was deep.

“We tore slowly along the over­hang­ing bushes in a whirl of bro­ken twigs and fly­ing leaves. The fusil­lade be­low stopped short, as I had fore­seen it would when the squirts got empty. I threw my head back to a glint­ing whizz that tra­versed the pi­lot­house, in at one shut­ter-hole and out at the other. Look­ing past that mad helms­man, who was shak­ing the empty ri­fle and yelling at the shore, I saw vague forms of men run­ning bent dou­ble, leap­ing, glid­ing, dis­tinct, in­com­plete, evanes­cent. Some­thing big ap­peared in the air be­fore the shut­ter, the ri­fle went over­board, and the man stepped back swiftly, looked at me over his shoul­der in an ex­tra­or­di­nary, pro­found, fa­mil­iar man­ner, and fell upon my feet. The side of his head hit the wheel twice, and the end of what ap­peared a long cane clat­tered round and knocked over a lit­tle camp­stool. It looked as though af­ter wrench­ing that thing from some­body ashore he had lost his bal­ance in the ef­fort. The thin smoke had blown away, we were clear of the snag, and look­ing ahead I could see that in an­other hun­dred yards or so I would be free to sheer off, away from the bank; but my feet felt so very warm and wet that I had to look down. The man had rolled on his back and stared straight up at me; both his hands clutched that cane. It was the shaft of a spear that, ei­ther thrown or lunged through the open­ing, had caught him in the side, just be­low the ribs; the blade had gone in out of sight, af­ter mak­ing a fright­ful gash; my shoes were full; a pool of blood lay very still, gleam­ing dark-red un­der the wheel; his eyes shone with an amaz­ing lus­tre. The fusil­lade burst out again. He looked at me anx­iously, grip­ping the spear like some­thing pre­cious, with an air of be­ing afraid I would try to take it away from him. I had to make an ef­fort to free my eyes from his gaze and at­tend to the steer­ing. With one hand I felt above my head for the line of the steam whis­tle, and jerked out screech af­ter screech hur­riedly. The tu­mult of an­gry and war­like yells was checked in­stantly, and then from the depths of the woods went out such a tremu­lous and pro­longed wail of mourn­ful fear and ut­ter de­spair as may be imag­ined to fol­low the flight of the last hope from the earth. There was a great com­mo­tion in the bush; the shower of ar­rows stopped, a few drop­ping shots rang out sharply—then si­lence, in which the lan­guid beat of the stern-wheel came plainly to my ears. I put the helm hard a-star­board at the mo­ment when the pil­grim in pink py­ja­mas, very hot and ag­i­tated, ap­peared in the door­way. ‘The man­ager sends me—’ he be­gan in an of­fi­cial tone, and stopped short. ‘Good God!’ he said, glar­ing at the wounded man.

“We two whites stood over him, and his lus­trous and in­quir­ing glance en­veloped us both. I de­clare it looked as though he would presently put to us some ques­tions in an un­der­stand­able lan­guage; but he died with­out ut­ter­ing a sound, with­out mov­ing a limb, with­out twitch­ing a mus­cle. Only in the very last mo­ment, as though in re­sponse to some sign we could not see, to some whis­per we could not hear, he frowned heav­ily, and that frown gave to his black death-mask an in­con­ceiv­ably som­bre, brood­ing, and men­ac­ing ex­pres­sion. The lus­tre of in­quir­ing glance faded swiftly into va­cant glassi­ness. ‘Can you steer?’ I asked the agent ea­gerly. He looked very du­bi­ous; but I made a grab at his arm, and he un­der­stood at once I meant him to steer whether or no. To tell you the truth, I was mor­bidly anx­ious to change my shoes and socks. ‘He is dead,’ mur­mured the fel­low, im­mensely im­pressed. ‘No doubt about it,’ said I, tug­ging like mad at the shoelaces. ‘And by the way, I sup­pose Mr. Kurtz is dead as well by this time.’

“For the mo­ment that was the dom­i­nant thought. There was a sense of ex­treme dis­ap­point­ment, as though I had found out I had been striv­ing af­ter some­thing al­to­gether with­out a sub­stance. I couldn’t have been more dis­gusted if I had trav­elled all this way for the sole pur­pose of talk­ing with Mr. Kurtz. Talk­ing with … I flung one shoe over­board, and be­came aware that that was ex­actly what I had been look­ing for­ward to—a talk with Kurtz. I made the strange dis­cov­ery that I had never imag­ined him as do­ing, you know, but as dis­cours­ing. I didn’t say to my­self, ‘Now I will never see him,’ or ‘Now I will never shake him by the hand,’ but, ‘Now I will never hear him.’ The man pre­sented him­self as a voice. Not of course that I did not con­nect him with some sort of ac­tion. Hadn’t I been told in all the tones of jeal­ousy and ad­mi­ra­tion that he had col­lected, bartered, swin­dled, or stolen more ivory than all the other agents to­gether? That was not the point. The point was in his be­ing a gifted crea­ture, and that of all his gifts the one that stood out pre­em­i­nently, that car­ried with it a sense of real pres­ence, was his abil­ity to talk, his words—the gift of ex­pres­sion, the be­wil­der­ing, the il­lu­mi­nat­ing, the most ex­alted and the most con­temptible, the pul­sat­ing stream of light, or the de­ceit­ful flow from the heart of an im­pen­e­tra­ble dark­ness.

“The other shoe went fly­ing unto the devil-god of that river. I thought, ‘By Jove! it’s all over. We are too late; he has van­ished—the gift has van­ished, by means of some spear, ar­row, or club. I will never hear that chap speak af­ter all’—and my sor­row had a star­tling ex­trav­a­gance of emo­tion, even such as I had no­ticed in the howl­ing sor­row of these sav­ages in the bush. I couldn’t have felt more of lonely des­o­la­tion some­how, had I been robbed of a be­lief or had missed my des­tiny in life. … Why do you sigh in this beastly way, some­body? Ab­surd? Well, ab­surd. Good Lord! mustn’t a man ever—Here, give me some to­bacco.” …

There was a pause of pro­found still­ness, then a match flared, and Mar­low’s lean face ap­peared, worn, hol­low, with down­ward folds and dropped eye­lids, with an as­pect of con­cen­trated at­ten­tion; and as he took vig­or­ous draws at his pipe, it seemed to re­treat and ad­vance out of the night in the reg­u­lar flicker of tiny flame. The match went out.

“Ab­surd!” he cried. “This is the worst of try­ing to tell. … Here you all are, each moored with two good ad­dresses, like a hulk with two an­chors, a butcher round one cor­ner, a po­lice­man round an­other, ex­cel­lent ap­petites, and tem­per­a­ture nor­mal—you hear—nor­mal from year’s end to year’s end. And you say, Ab­surd! Ab­surd be—ex­ploded! Ab­surd! My dear boys, what can you ex­pect from a man who out of sheer ner­vous­ness had just flung over­board a pair of new shoes! Now I think of it, it is amaz­ing I did not shed tears. I am, upon the whole, proud of my for­ti­tude. I was cut to the quick at the idea of hav­ing lost the in­es­timable priv­i­lege of lis­ten­ing to the gifted Kurtz. Of course I was wrong. The priv­i­lege was wait­ing for me. Oh, yes, I heard more than enough. And I was right, too. A voice. He was very lit­tle more than a voice. And I heard—him—it—this voice—other voices—all of them were so lit­tle more than voices—and the mem­ory of that time it­self lingers around me, im­pal­pa­ble, like a dy­ing vi­bra­tion of one im­mense jab­ber, silly, atro­cious, sor­did, sav­age, or sim­ply mean, with­out any kind of sense. Voices, voices—even the girl her­self—now—”

He was silent for a long time.

“I laid the ghost of his gifts at last with a lie,” he be­gan, sud­denly. “Girl! What? Did I men­tion a girl? Oh, she is out of it—com­pletely. They—the women, I mean—are out of it—should be out of it. We must help them to stay in that beau­ti­ful world of their own, lest ours gets worse. Oh, she had to be out of it. You should have heard the dis­in­terred body of Mr. Kurtz say­ing, ‘My In­tended.’ You would have per­ceived di­rectly then how com­pletely she was out of it. And the lofty frontal bone of Mr. Kurtz! They say the hair goes on grow­ing some­times, but this—ah—spec­i­men, was im­pres­sively bald. The wilder­ness had pat­ted him on the head, and, be­hold, it was like a ball—an ivory ball; it had ca­ressed him, and—lo!—he had with­ered; it had taken him, loved him, em­braced him, got into his veins, con­sumed his flesh, and sealed his soul to its own by the in­con­ceiv­able cer­e­monies of some dev­il­ish ini­ti­a­tion. He was its spoiled and pam­pered favourite. Ivory? I should think so. Heaps of it, stacks of it. The old mud shanty was burst­ing with it. You would think there was not a sin­gle tusk left ei­ther above or be­low the ground in the whole coun­try. ‘Mostly fos­sil,’ the man­ager had re­marked, dis­parag­ingly. It was no more fos­sil than I am; but they call it fos­sil when it is dug up. It ap­pears these nig­gers do bury the tusks some­times—but ev­i­dently they couldn’t bury this par­cel deep enough to save the gifted Mr. Kurtz from his fate. We filled the steam­boat with it, and had to pile a lot on the deck. Thus he could see and en­joy as long as he could see, be­cause the ap­pre­ci­a­tion of this favour had re­mained with him to the last. You should have heard him say, ‘My ivory.’ Oh, yes, I heard him. ‘My In­tended, my ivory, my sta­tion, my river, my—’ ev­ery­thing be­longed to him. It made me hold my breath in ex­pec­ta­tion of hear­ing the wilder­ness burst into a prodi­gious peal of laugh­ter that would shake the fixed stars in their places. Every­thing be­longed to him—but that was a tri­fle. The thing was to know what he be­longed to, how many pow­ers of dark­ness claimed him for their own. That was the re­flec­tion that made you creepy all over. It was im­pos­si­ble—it was not good for one ei­ther—try­ing to imag­ine. He had taken a high seat amongst the dev­ils of the land—I mean lit­er­ally. You can’t un­der­stand. How could you?—with solid pave­ment un­der your feet, sur­rounded by kind neigh­bours ready to cheer you or to fall on you, step­ping del­i­cately be­tween the butcher and the po­lice­man, in the holy ter­ror of scan­dal and gal­lows and lu­natic asy­lums—how can you imag­ine what par­tic­u­lar re­gion of the first ages a man’s un­tram­melled feet may take him into by the way of soli­tude—ut­ter soli­tude with­out a po­lice­man—by the way of si­lence—ut­ter si­lence, where no warn­ing voice of a kind neigh­bour can be heard whis­per­ing of pub­lic opin­ion? Th­ese lit­tle things make all the great dif­fer­ence. When they are gone you must fall back upon your own in­nate strength, upon your own ca­pac­ity for faith­ful­ness. Of course you may be too much of a fool to go wrong—too dull even to know you are be­ing as­saulted by the pow­ers of dark­ness. I take it, no fool ever made a bar­gain for his soul with the devil; the fool is too much of a fool, or the devil too much of a devil—I don’t know which. Or you may be such a thun­der­ingly ex­alted crea­ture as to be al­to­gether deaf and blind to any­thing but heav­enly sights and sounds. Then the earth for you is only a stand­ing place—and whether to be like this is your loss or your gain I won’t pre­tend to say. But most of us are nei­ther one nor the other. The earth for us is a place to live in, where we must put up with sights, with sounds, with smells, too, by Jove!—breathe dead hippo, so to speak, and not be con­tam­i­nated. And there, don’t you see? Your strength comes in, the faith in your abil­ity for the dig­ging of un­os­ten­ta­tious holes to bury the stuff in—your power of de­vo­tion, not to your­self, but to an ob­scure, back­break­ing busi­ness. And that’s dif­fi­cult enough. Mind, I am not try­ing to ex­cuse or even ex­plain—I am try­ing to ac­count to my­self for—for—Mr. Kurtz—for the shade of Mr. Kurtz. This ini­ti­ated wraith from the back of Nowhere hon­oured me with its amaz­ing con­fi­dence be­fore it van­ished al­to­gether. This was be­cause it could speak English to me. The orig­i­nal Kurtz had been ed­u­cated partly in Eng­land, and—as he was good enough to say him­self—his sym­pa­thies were in the right place. His mother was half-English, his fa­ther was half-French. All Europe con­trib­uted to the mak­ing of Kurtz; and by and by I learned that, most ap­pro­pri­ately, the In­ter­na­tional So­ci­ety for the Sup­pres­sion of Sav­age Cus­toms had in­trusted him with the mak­ing of a re­port, for its fu­ture guid­ance. And he had writ­ten it, too. I’ve seen it. I’ve read it. It was elo­quent, vi­brat­ing with elo­quence, but too high-strung, I think. Seven­teen pages of close writ­ing he had found time for! But this must have been be­fore his—let us say—nerves, went wrong, and caused him to pre­side at cer­tain mid­night dances end­ing with un­speak­able rites, which—as far as I re­luc­tantly gath­ered from what I heard at var­i­ous times—were of­fered up to him—do you un­der­stand?—to Mr. Kurtz him­self. But it was a beau­ti­ful piece of writ­ing. The open­ing para­graph, how­ever, in the light of later in­for­ma­tion, strikes me now as omi­nous. He be­gan with the ar­gu­ment that we whites, from the point of de­vel­op­ment we had ar­rived at, ‘must nec­es­sar­ily ap­pear to them [sav­ages] in the na­ture of su­per­nat­u­ral be­ings—we ap­proach them with the might of a de­ity,’ and so on, and so on. ‘By the sim­ple ex­er­cise of our will we can ex­ert a power for good prac­ti­cally un­bounded,’ etc., etc. From that point he soared and took me with him. The per­ora­tion was mag­nif­i­cent, though dif­fi­cult to re­mem­ber, you know. It gave me the no­tion of an ex­otic Im­men­sity ruled by an au­gust Benev­o­lence. It made me tin­gle with en­thu­si­asm. This was the un­bounded power of elo­quence—of words—of burn­ing no­ble words. There were no prac­ti­cal hints to in­ter­rupt the magic cur­rent of phrases, un­less a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled ev­i­dently much later, in an un­steady hand, may be re­garded as the ex­po­si­tion of a method. It was very sim­ple, and at the end of that mov­ing ap­peal to ev­ery al­tru­is­tic sen­ti­ment it blazed at you, lu­mi­nous and ter­ri­fy­ing, like a flash of light­ning in a serene sky: ‘Ex­ter­mi­nate all the brutes!’ The cu­ri­ous part was that he had ap­par­ently for­got­ten all about that valu­able postscrip­tum, be­cause, later on, when he in a sense came to him­self, he re­peat­edly en­treated me to take good care of ‘my pam­phlet’ (he called it), as it was sure to have in the fu­ture a good in­flu­ence upon his ca­reer. I had full in­for­ma­tion about all these things, and, be­sides, as it turned out, I was to have the care of his mem­ory. I’ve done enough for it to give me the in­dis­putable right to lay it, if I choose, for an ev­er­last­ing rest in the dust­bin of progress, amongst all the sweep­ings and, fig­u­ra­tively speak­ing, all the dead cats of civ­i­liza­tion. But then, you see, I can’t choose. He won’t be for­got­ten. What­ever he was, he was not com­mon. He had the power to charm or frighten rudi­men­tary souls into an ag­gra­vated witch-dance in his hon­our; he could also fill the small souls of the pil­grims with bit­ter mis­giv­ings: he had one de­voted friend at least, and he had con­quered one soul in the world that was nei­ther rudi­men­tary nor tainted with self-seek­ing. No; I can’t for­get him, though I am not pre­pared to af­firm the fel­low was ex­actly worth the life we lost in get­ting to him. I missed my late helms­man aw­fully—I missed him even while his body was still ly­ing in the pi­lot­house. Per­haps you will think it pass­ing strange this re­gret for a sav­age who was no more ac­count than a grain of sand in a black Sa­hara. Well, don’t you see, he had done some­thing, he had steered; for months I had him at my back—a help—an in­stru­ment. It was a kind of part­ner­ship. He steered for me—I had to look af­ter him, I wor­ried about his de­fi­cien­cies, and thus a sub­tle bond had been cre­ated, of which I only be­came aware when it was sud­denly bro­ken. And the in­ti­mate pro­fun­dity of that look he gave me when he re­ceived his hurt re­mains to this day in my mem­ory—like a claim of dis­tant kin­ship af­firmed in a supreme mo­ment.

“Poor fool! If he had only left that shut­ter alone. He had no re­straint, no re­straint—just like Kurtz—a tree swayed by the wind. As soon as I had put on a dry pair of slip­pers, I dragged him out, af­ter first jerk­ing the spear out of his side, which op­er­a­tion I con­fess I per­formed with my eyes shut tight. His heels leaped to­gether over the lit­tle doorstep; his shoul­ders were pressed to my breast; I hugged him from be­hind des­per­ately. Oh! he was heavy, heavy; heav­ier than any man on earth, I should imag­ine. Then with­out more ado I tipped him over­board. The cur­rent snatched him as though he had been a wisp of grass, and I saw the body roll over twice be­fore I lost sight of it for­ever. All the pil­grims and the man­ager were then con­gre­gated on the awning-deck about the pi­lot­house, chat­ter­ing at each other like a flock of ex­cited mag­pies, and there was a scan­dal­ized mur­mur at my heart­less promp­ti­tude. What they wanted to keep that body hang­ing about for I can’t guess. Em­balm it, maybe. But I had also heard an­other, and a very omi­nous, mur­mur on the deck be­low. My friends the wood­cut­ters were like­wise scan­dal­ized, and with a bet­ter show of rea­son—though I ad­mit that the rea­son it­self was quite in­ad­mis­si­ble. Oh, quite! I had made up my mind that if my late helms­man was to be eaten, the fishes alone should have him. He had been a very sec­ond-rate helms­man while alive, but now he was dead he might have be­come a first-class temp­ta­tion, and pos­si­bly cause some star­tling trou­ble. Be­sides, I was anx­ious to take the wheel, the man in pink py­ja­mas show­ing him­self a hope­less duf­fer at the busi­ness.

“This I did di­rectly the sim­ple fu­neral was over. We were go­ing half-speed, keep­ing right in the mid­dle of the stream, and I lis­tened to the talk about me. They had given up Kurtz, they had given up the sta­tion; Kurtz was dead, and the sta­tion had been burnt—and so on—and so on. The red-haired pil­grim was be­side him­self with the thought that at least this poor Kurtz had been prop­erly avenged. ‘Say! We must have made a glo­ri­ous slaugh­ter of them in the bush. Eh? What do you think? Say?’ He pos­i­tively danced, the blood­thirsty lit­tle gin­gery beg­gar. And he had nearly fainted when he saw the wounded man! I could not help say­ing, ‘You made a glo­ri­ous lot of smoke, any­how.’ I had seen, from the way the tops of the bushes rus­tled and flew, that al­most all the shots had gone too high. You can’t hit any­thing un­less you take aim and fire from the shoul­der; but these chaps fired from the hip with their eyes shut. The re­treat, I main­tained—and I was right—was caused by the screech­ing of the steam whis­tle. Upon this they for­got Kurtz, and be­gan to howl at me with in­dig­nant protests.

“The man­ager stood by the wheel mur­mur­ing con­fi­den­tially about the ne­ces­sity of get­ting well away down the river be­fore dark at all events, when I saw in the dis­tance a clear­ing on the river­side and the out­lines of some sort of build­ing. ‘What’s this?’ I asked. He clapped his hands in won­der. ‘The sta­tion!’ he cried. I edged in at once, still go­ing half-speed.

“Through my glasses I saw the slope of a hill in­ter­spersed with rare trees and per­fectly free from un­der­growth. A long de­cay­ing build­ing on the sum­mit was half buried in the high grass; the large holes in the peaked roof gaped black from afar; the jun­gle and the woods made a back­ground. There was no en­clo­sure or fence of any kind; but there had been one ap­par­ently, for near the house half-a-dozen slim posts re­mained in a row, roughly trimmed, and with their up­per ends or­na­mented with round carved balls. The rails, or what­ever there had been be­tween, had dis­ap­peared. Of course the for­est sur­rounded all that. The river­bank was clear, and on the wa­ter­side I saw a white man un­der a hat like a cart­wheel beck­on­ing per­sis­tently with his whole arm. Ex­am­in­ing the edge of the for­est above and be­low, I was al­most cer­tain I could see move­ments—hu­man forms glid­ing here and there. I steamed past pru­dently, then stopped the en­gines and let her drift down. The man on the shore be­gan to shout, urg­ing us to land. ‘We have been at­tacked,’ screamed the man­ager. ‘I know—I know. It’s all right,’ yelled back the other, as cheer­ful as you please. ‘Come along. It’s all right. I am glad.’

“His as­pect re­minded me of some­thing I had seen—some­thing funny I had seen some­where. As I ma­noeu­vred to get along­side, I was ask­ing my­self, ‘What does this fel­low look like?’ Sud­denly I got it. He looked like a har­le­quin. His clothes had been made of some stuff that was brown hol­land prob­a­bly, but it was cov­ered with patches all over, with bright patches, blue, red, and yel­low—patches on the back, patches on the front, patches on el­bows, on knees; coloured bind­ing around his jacket, scar­let edg­ing at the bot­tom of his trousers; and the sun­shine made him look ex­tremely gay and won­der­fully neat withal, be­cause you could see how beau­ti­fully all this patch­ing had been done. A beard­less, boy­ish face, very fair, no fea­tures to speak of, nose peel­ing, lit­tle blue eyes, smiles and frowns chas­ing each other over that open coun­te­nance like sun­shine and shadow on a windswept plain. ‘Look out, cap­tain!’ he cried; ‘there’s a snag lodged in here last night.’ What! Another snag? I con­fess I swore shame­fully. I had nearly holed my crip­ple, to fin­ish off that charm­ing trip. The har­le­quin on the bank turned his lit­tle pug-nose up to me. ‘You English?’ he asked, all smiles. ‘Are you?’ I shouted from the wheel. The smiles van­ished, and he shook his head as if sorry for my dis­ap­point­ment. Then he bright­ened up. ‘Never mind!’ he cried en­cour­ag­ingly. ‘Are we in time?’ I asked. ‘He is up there,’ he replied, with a toss of the head up the hill, and be­com­ing gloomy all of a sud­den. His face was like the au­tumn sky, over­cast one mo­ment and bright the next.

“When the man­ager, es­corted by the pil­grims, all of them armed to the teeth, had gone to the house this chap came on board. ‘I say, I don’t like this. Th­ese na­tives are in the bush,’ I said. He as­sured me earnestly it was all right. ‘They are sim­ple peo­ple,’ he added; ‘well, I am glad you came. It took me all my time to keep them off.’ ‘But you said it was all right,’ I cried. ‘Oh, they meant no harm,’ he said; and as I stared he cor­rected him­self, ‘Not ex­actly.’ Then vi­va­ciously, ‘My faith, your pi­lot­house wants a cleanup!’ In the next breath he ad­vised me to keep enough steam on the boiler to blow the whis­tle in case of any trou­ble. ‘One good screech will do more for you than all your ri­fles. They are sim­ple peo­ple,’ he re­peated. He rat­tled away at such a rate he quite over­whelmed me. He seemed to be try­ing to make up for lots of si­lence, and ac­tu­ally hinted, laugh­ing, that such was the case. ‘Don’t you talk with Mr. Kurtz?’ I said. ‘You don’t talk with that man—you lis­ten to him,’ he ex­claimed with se­vere ex­al­ta­tion. ‘But now—’ He waved his arm, and in the twin­kling of an eye was in the ut­ter­most depths of de­spon­dency. In a mo­ment he came up again with a jump, pos­sessed him­self of both my hands, shook them con­tin­u­ously, while he gab­bled: ‘Brother sailor … hon­our … plea­sure … de­light … in­tro­duce my­self … Rus­sian … son of an arch­priest … Govern­ment of Tam­bov … What? Tobacco! English to­bacco; the ex­cel­lent English to­bacco! Now, that’s broth­erly. Smoke? Where’s a sailor that does not smoke?”

“The pipe soothed him, and grad­u­ally I made out he had run away from school, had gone to sea in a Rus­sian ship; ran away again; served some time in English ships; was now rec­on­ciled with the arch­priest. He made a point of that. ‘But when one is young one must see things, gather ex­pe­ri­ence, ideas; en­large the mind.’ ‘Here!’ I in­ter­rupted. ‘You can never tell! Here I met Mr. Kurtz,’ he said, youth­fully solemn and re­proach­ful. I held my tongue af­ter that. It ap­pears he had per­suaded a Dutch trad­ing-house on the coast to fit him out with stores and goods, and had started for the in­te­rior with a light heart and no more idea of what would hap­pen to him than a baby. He had been wan­der­ing about that river for nearly two years alone, cut off from ev­ery­body and ev­ery­thing. ‘I am not so young as I look. I am twenty-five,’ he said. ‘At first old Van Shuyten would tell me to go to the devil,’ he nar­rated with keen en­joy­ment; ‘but I stuck to him, and talked and talked, till at last he got afraid I would talk the hind-leg off his favourite dog, so he gave me some cheap things and a few guns, and told me he hoped he would never see my face again. Good old Dutch­man, Van Shuyten. I’ve sent him one small lot of ivory a year ago, so that he can’t call me a lit­tle thief when I get back. I hope he got it. And for the rest I don’t care. I had some wood stacked for you. That was my old house. Did you see?’

“I gave him Tow­son’s book. He made as though he would kiss me, but re­strained him­self. ‘The only book I had left, and I thought I had lost it,’ he said, look­ing at it ec­stat­i­cally. ‘So many ac­ci­dents hap­pen to a man go­ing about alone, you know. Ca­noes get up­set some­times—and some­times you’ve got to clear out so quick when the peo­ple get an­gry.’ He thumbed the pages. ‘You made notes in Rus­sian?’ I asked. He nod­ded. ‘I thought they were writ­ten in ci­pher,’ I said. He laughed, then be­came se­ri­ous. ‘I had lots of trou­ble to keep these peo­ple off,’ he said. ‘Did they want to kill you?’ I asked. ‘Oh, no!’ he cried, and checked him­self. ‘Why did they at­tack us?’ I pur­sued. He hes­i­tated, then said shame­facedly, ‘They don’t want him to go.’ ‘Don’t they?’ I said cu­ri­ously. He nod­ded a nod full of mys­tery and wis­dom. ‘I tell you,’ he cried, ‘this man has en­larged my mind.’ He opened his arms wide, star­ing at me with his lit­tle blue eyes that were per­fectly round.”

III

“I looked at him, lost in as­ton­ish­ment. There he was be­fore me, in mot­ley, as though he had ab­sconded from a troupe of mimes, en­thu­si­as­tic, fab­u­lous. His very ex­is­tence was im­prob­a­ble, in­ex­pli­ca­ble, and al­to­gether be­wil­der­ing. He was an in­sol­u­ble prob­lem. It was in­con­ceiv­able how he had ex­isted, how he had suc­ceeded in get­ting so far, how he had man­aged to re­main—why he did not in­stantly dis­ap­pear. ‘I went a lit­tle far­ther,’ he said, ‘then still a lit­tle far­ther—till I had gone so far that I don’t know how I’ll ever get back. Never mind. Plenty time. I can man­age. You take Kurtz away quick—quick—I tell you.’ The glam­our of youth en­veloped his par­ti­coloured rags, his des­ti­tu­tion, his lone­li­ness, the es­sen­tial des­o­la­tion of his fu­tile wan­der­ings. For months—for years—his life hadn’t been worth a day’s pur­chase; and there he was gal­lantly, thought­lessly alive, to all ap­pear­ances in­de­struc­tible solely by the virtue of his few years and of his un­re­flect­ing au­dac­ity. I was se­duced into some­thing like ad­mi­ra­tion—like envy. Glam­our urged him on, glam­our kept him un­scathed. He surely wanted noth­ing from the wilder­ness but space to breathe in and to push on through. His need was to ex­ist, and to move on­wards at the great­est pos­si­ble risk, and with a max­i­mum of pri­va­tion. If the ab­so­lutely pure, un­cal­cu­lat­ing, un­prac­ti­cal spirit of ad­ven­ture had ever ruled a hu­man be­ing, it ruled this bepatched youth. I al­most en­vied him the pos­ses­sion of this mod­est and clear flame. It seemed to have con­sumed all thought of self so com­pletely, that even while he was talk­ing to you, you for­got that it was he—the man be­fore your eyes—who had gone through these things. I did not envy him his de­vo­tion to Kurtz, though. He had not med­i­tated over it. It came to him, and he ac­cepted it with a sort of ea­ger fa­tal­ism. I must say that to me it ap­peared about the most dan­ger­ous thing in ev­ery way he had come upon so far.

“They had come to­gether un­avoid­ably, like two ships be­calmed near each other, and lay rub­bing sides at last. I sup­pose Kurtz wanted an au­di­ence, be­cause on a cer­tain oc­ca­sion, when en­camped in the for­est, they had talked all night, or more prob­a­bly Kurtz had talked. ‘We talked of ev­ery­thing,’ he said, quite trans­ported at the rec­ol­lec­tion. ‘I for­got there was such a thing as sleep. The night did not seem to last an hour. Every­thing! Every­thing! … Of love, too.’ ‘Ah, he talked to you of love!’ I said, much amused. ‘It isn’t what you think,’ he cried, al­most pas­sion­ately. ‘It was in gen­eral. He made me see things—things.’

“He threw his arms up. We were on deck at the time, and the head­man of my wood­cut­ters, loung­ing near by, turned upon him his heavy and glit­ter­ing eyes. I looked around, and I don’t know why, but I as­sure you that never, never be­fore, did this land, this river, this jun­gle, the very arch of this blaz­ing sky, ap­pear to me so hope­less and so dark, so im­pen­e­tra­ble to hu­man thought, so piti­less to hu­man weak­ness. ‘And, ever since, you have been with him, of course?’ I said.

“On the con­trary. It ap­pears their in­ter­course had been very much bro­ken by var­i­ous causes. He had, as he in­formed me proudly, man­aged to nurse Kurtz through two ill­nesses (he al­luded to it as you would to some risky feat), but as a rule Kurtz wan­dered alone, far in the depths of the for­est. ‘Very of­ten com­ing to this sta­tion, I had to wait days and days be­fore he would turn up,’ he said. ‘Ah, it was worth wait­ing for!—some­times.’ ‘What was he do­ing? ex­plor­ing or what?’ I asked. ‘Oh, yes, of course’; he had dis­cov­ered lots of vil­lages, a lake, too—he did not know ex­actly in what di­rec­tion; it was dan­ger­ous to in­quire too much—but mostly his ex­pe­di­tions had been for ivory. ‘But he had no goods to trade with by that time,’ I ob­jected. ‘There’s a good lot of car­tridges left even yet,’ he an­swered, look­ing away. ‘To speak plainly, he raided the coun­try,’ I said. He nod­ded. ‘Not alone, surely!’ He mut­tered some­thing about the vil­lages round that lake. ‘Kurtz got the tribe to fol­low him, did he?’ I sug­gested. He fid­geted a lit­tle. ‘They adored him,’ he said. The tone of these words was so ex­tra­or­di­nary that I looked at him search­ingly. It was cu­ri­ous to see his min­gled ea­ger­ness and re­luc­tance to speak of Kurtz. The man filled his life, oc­cu­pied his thoughts, swayed his emo­tions. ‘What can you ex­pect?’ he burst out; ‘he came to them with thun­der and light­ning, you know—and they had never seen any­thing like it—and very ter­ri­ble. He could be very ter­ri­ble. You can’t judge Mr. Kurtz as you would an or­di­nary man. No, no, no! Now—just to give you an idea—I don’t mind telling you, he wanted to shoot me, too, one day—but I don’t judge him.’ ‘Shoot you!’ I cried. ‘What for?’ ‘Well, I had a small lot of ivory the chief of that vil­lage near my house gave me. You see I used to shoot game for them. Well, he wanted it, and wouldn’t hear rea­son. He de­clared he would shoot me un­less I gave him the ivory and then cleared out of the coun­try, be­cause he could do so, and had a fancy for it, and there was noth­ing on earth to pre­vent him killing whom he jolly well pleased. And it was true, too. I gave him the ivory. What did I care! But I didn’t clear out. No, no. I couldn’t leave him. I had to be care­ful, of course, till we got friendly again for a time. He had his sec­ond ill­ness then. After­wards I had to keep out of the way; but I didn’t mind. He was liv­ing for the most part in those vil­lages on the lake. When he came down to the river, some­times he would take to me, and some­times it was bet­ter for me to be care­ful. This man suf­fered too much. He hated all this, and some­how he couldn’t get away. When I had a chance I begged him to try and leave while there was time; I of­fered to go back with him. And he would say yes, and then he would re­main; go off on an­other ivory hunt; dis­ap­pear for weeks; for­get him­self amongst these peo­ple—for­get him­self—you know.’ ‘Why! he’s mad,’ I said. He protested in­dig­nantly. Mr. Kurtz couldn’t be mad. If I had heard him talk, only two days ago, I wouldn’t dare hint at such a thing. … I had taken up my binoc­u­lars while we talked, and was look­ing at the shore, sweep­ing the limit of the for­est at each side and at the back of the house. The con­scious­ness of there be­ing peo­ple in that bush, so silent, so quiet—as silent and quiet as the ru­ined house on the hill—made me un­easy. There was no sign on the face of na­ture of this amaz­ing tale that was not so much told as sug­gested to me in des­o­late ex­cla­ma­tions, com­pleted by shrugs, in in­ter­rupted phrases, in hints end­ing in deep sighs. The woods were un­moved, like a mask—heavy, like the closed door of a prison—they looked with their air of hid­den knowl­edge, of pa­tient ex­pec­ta­tion, of un­ap­proach­able si­lence. The Rus­sian was ex­plain­ing to me that it was only lately that Mr. Kurtz had come down to the river, bring­ing along with him all the fight­ing men of that lake tribe. He had been ab­sent for sev­eral months—get­ting him­self adored, I sup­pose—and had come down un­ex­pect­edly, with the in­ten­tion to all ap­pear­ance of mak­ing a raid ei­ther across the river or down stream. Ev­i­dently the ap­petite for more ivory had got the bet­ter of the—what shall I say?—less ma­te­rial as­pi­ra­tions. How­ever he had got much worse sud­denly. ‘I heard he was ly­ing help­less, and so I came up—took my chance,’ said the Rus­sian. ‘Oh, he is bad, very bad.’ I di­rected my glass to the house. There were no signs of life, but there was the ru­ined roof, the long mud wall peep­ing above the grass, with three lit­tle square win­dow-holes, no two of the same size; all this brought within reach of my hand, as it were. And then I made a brusque move­ment, and one of the re­main­ing posts of that van­ished fence leaped up in the field of my glass. You re­mem­ber I told you I had been struck at the dis­tance by cer­tain at­tempts at or­na­men­ta­tion, rather re­mark­able in the ru­inous as­pect of the place. Now I had sud­denly a nearer view, and its first re­sult was to make me throw my head back as if be­fore a blow. Then I went care­fully from post to post with my glass, and I saw my mis­take. Th­ese round knobs were not or­na­men­tal but sym­bolic; they were ex­pres­sive and puz­zling, strik­ing and dis­turb­ing—food for thought and also for vul­tures if there had been any look­ing down from the sky; but at all events for such ants as were in­dus­tri­ous enough to as­cend the pole. They would have been even more im­pres­sive, those heads on the stakes, if their faces had not been turned to the house. Only one, the first I had made out, was fac­ing my way. I was not so shocked as you may think. The start back I had given was re­ally noth­ing but a move­ment of sur­prise. I had ex­pected to see a knob of wood there, you know. I re­turned de­lib­er­ately to the first I had seen—and there it was, black, dried, sunken, with closed eye­lids—a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and, with the shrunken dry lips show­ing a nar­row white line of the teeth, was smil­ing, too, smil­ing con­tin­u­ously at some end­less and jo­cose dream of that eter­nal slum­ber.

“I am not dis­clos­ing any trade se­crets. In fact, the man­ager said af­ter­wards that Mr. Kurtz’s meth­ods had ru­ined the dis­trict. I have no opin­ion on that point, but I want you clearly to un­der­stand that there was noth­ing ex­actly prof­itable in these heads be­ing there. They only showed that Mr. Kurtz lacked re­straint in the grat­i­fi­ca­tion of his var­i­ous lusts, that there was some­thing want­ing in him—some small mat­ter which, when the press­ing need arose, could not be found un­der his mag­nif­i­cent elo­quence. Whether he knew of this de­fi­ciency him­self I can’t say. I think the knowl­edge came to him at last—only at the very last. But the wilder­ness had found him out early, and had taken on him a ter­ri­ble vengeance for the fan­tas­tic in­va­sion. I think it had whis­pered to him things about him­self which he did not know, things of which he had no con­cep­tion till he took coun­sel with this great soli­tude—and the whis­per had proved ir­re­sistibly fas­ci­nat­ing. It echoed loudly within him be­cause he was hol­low at the core. … I put down the glass, and the head that had ap­peared near enough to be spo­ken to seemed at once to have leaped away from me into in­ac­ces­si­ble dis­tance.

“The ad­mirer of Mr. Kurtz was a bit crest­fallen. In a hur­ried, in­dis­tinct voice he be­gan to as­sure me he had not dared to take these—say, sym­bols—down. He was not afraid of the na­tives; they would not stir till Mr. Kurtz gave the word. His as­cen­dancy was ex­tra­or­di­nary. The camps of these peo­ple sur­rounded the place, and the chiefs came ev­ery day to see him. They would crawl. … ‘I don’t want to know any­thing of the cer­e­monies used when ap­proach­ing Mr. Kurtz,’ I shouted. Cu­ri­ous, this feel­ing that came over me that such de­tails would be more in­tol­er­a­ble than those heads dry­ing on the stakes un­der Mr. Kurtz’s win­dows. After all, that was only a sav­age sight, while I seemed at one bound to have been trans­ported into some light­less re­gion of sub­tle hor­rors, where pure, un­com­pli­cated sav­agery was a pos­i­tive re­lief, be­ing some­thing that had a right to ex­ist—ob­vi­ously—in the sun­shine. The young man looked at me with sur­prise. I sup­pose it did not oc­cur to him that Mr. Kurtz was no idol of mine. He for­got I hadn’t heard any of these splen­did mono­logues on, what was it? on love, jus­tice, con­duct of life—or what­not. If it had come to crawl­ing be­fore Mr. Kurtz, he crawled as much as the ver­i­est sav­age of them all. I had no idea of the con­di­tions, he said: these heads were the heads of rebels. I shocked him ex­ces­sively by laugh­ing. Rebels! What would be the next def­i­ni­tion I was to hear? There had been en­e­mies, crim­i­nals, work­ers—and these were rebels. Those re­bel­lious heads looked very sub­dued to me on their sticks. ‘You don’t know how such a life tries a man like Kurtz,’ cried Kurtz’s last dis­ci­ple. ‘Well, and you?’ I said. ‘I! I! I am a sim­ple man. I have no great thoughts. I want noth­ing from any­body. How can you com­pare me to … ?’ His feel­ings were too much for speech, and sud­denly he broke down. ‘I don’t un­der­stand,’ he groaned. ‘I’ve been do­ing my best to keep him alive, and that’s enough. I had no hand in all this. I have no abil­i­ties. There hasn’t been a drop of medicine or a mouth­ful of in­valid food for months here. He was shame­fully aban­doned. A man like this, with such ideas. Shame­fully! Shame­fully! I—I—haven’t slept for the last ten nights …’

“His voice lost it­self in the calm of the evening. The long shad­ows of the for­est had slipped down­hill while we talked, had gone far be­yond the ru­ined hovel, be­yond the sym­bolic row of stakes. All this was in the gloom, while we down there were yet in the sun­shine, and the stretch of the river abreast of the clear­ing glit­tered in a still and daz­zling splen­dour, with a murky and over­shad­owed bend above and be­low. Not a liv­ing soul was seen on the shore. The bushes did not rus­tle.

“Sud­denly round the cor­ner of the house a group of men ap­peared, as though they had come up from the ground. They waded waist-deep in the grass, in a com­pact body, bear­ing an im­pro­vised stretcher in their midst. In­stantly, in the empti­ness of the land­scape, a cry arose whose shrill­ness pierced the still air like a sharp ar­row fly­ing straight to the very heart of the land; and, as if by en­chant­ment, streams of hu­man be­ings—of naked hu­man be­ings—with spears in their hands, with bows, with shields, with wild glances and sav­age move­ments, were poured into the clear­ing by the dark-faced and pen­sive for­est. The bushes shook, the grass swayed for a time, and then ev­ery­thing stood still in at­ten­tive im­mo­bil­ity.

“ ‘Now, if he does not say the right thing to them we are all done for,’ said the Rus­sian at my el­bow. The knot of men with the stretcher had stopped, too, half­way to the steamer, as if pet­ri­fied. I saw the man on the stretcher sit up, lank and with an up­lifted arm, above the shoul­ders of the bear­ers. ‘Let us hope that the man who can talk so well of love in gen­eral will find some par­tic­u­lar rea­son to spare us this time,’ I said. I re­sented bit­terly the ab­surd dan­ger of our sit­u­a­tion, as if to be at the mercy of that atro­cious phan­tom had been a dis­hon­our­ing ne­ces­sity. I could not hear a sound, but through my glasses I saw the thin arm ex­tended com­mand­ingly, the lower jaw mov­ing, the eyes of that ap­pari­tion shin­ing darkly far in its bony head that nod­ded with grotesque jerks. Kurtz—Kurtz—that means short in Ger­man—don’t it? Well, the name was as true as ev­ery­thing else in his life—and death. He looked at least seven feet long. His cov­er­ing had fallen off, and his body emerged from it piti­ful and ap­palling as from a wind­ing-sheet. I could see the cage of his ribs all astir, the bones of his arm wav­ing. It was as though an an­i­mated im­age of death carved out of old ivory had been shak­ing its hand with men­aces at a mo­tion­less crowd of men made of dark and glit­ter­ing bronze. I saw him open his mouth wide—it gave him a weirdly vo­ra­cious as­pect, as though he had wanted to swal­low all the air, all the earth, all the men be­fore him. A deep voice reached me faintly. He must have been shout­ing. He fell back sud­denly. The stretcher shook as the bear­ers stag­gered for­ward again, and al­most at the same time I no­ticed that the crowd of sav­ages was van­ish­ing with­out any per­cep­ti­ble move­ment of re­treat, as if the for­est that had ejected these be­ings so sud­denly had drawn them in again as the breath is drawn in a long as­pi­ra­tion.

“Some of the pil­grims be­hind the stretcher car­ried his arms—two shot­guns, a heavy ri­fle, and a light re­volver-car­bine—the thun­der­bolts of that piti­ful Jupiter. The man­ager bent over him mur­mur­ing as he walked be­side his head. They laid him down in one of the lit­tle cab­ins—just a room for a bed place and a camp­stool or two, you know. We had brought his be­lated cor­re­spon­dence, and a lot of torn en­velopes and open let­ters lit­tered his bed. His hand roamed fee­bly amongst these pa­pers. I was struck by the fire of his eyes and the com­posed lan­guor of his ex­pres­sion. It was not so much the ex­haus­tion of dis­ease. He did not seem in pain. This shadow looked sa­ti­ated and calm, as though for the mo­ment it had had its fill of all the emo­tions.

“He rus­tled one of the let­ters, and look­ing straight in my face said, ‘I am glad.’ Some­body had been writ­ing to him about me. Th­ese spe­cial rec­om­men­da­tions were turn­ing up again. The vol­ume of tone he emit­ted with­out ef­fort, al­most with­out the trou­ble of mov­ing his lips, amazed me. A voice! a voice! It was grave, pro­found, vi­brat­ing, while the man did not seem ca­pa­ble of a whis­per. How­ever, he had enough strength in him—fac­ti­tious no doubt—to very nearly make an end of us, as you shall hear di­rectly.

“The man­ager ap­peared silently in the door­way; I stepped out at once and he drew the cur­tain af­ter me. The Rus­sian, eyed cu­ri­ously by the pil­grims, was star­ing at the shore. I fol­lowed the di­rec­tion of his glance.

“Dark hu­man shapes could be made out in the dis­tance, flit­ting in­dis­tinctly against the gloomy bor­der of the for­est, and near the river two bronze fig­ures, lean­ing on tall spears, stood in the sun­light un­der fan­tas­tic head­dresses of spot­ted skins, war­like and still in stat­uesque re­pose. And from right to left along the lighted shore moved a wild and gor­geous ap­pari­tion of a woman.

“She walked with mea­sured steps, draped in striped and fringed cloths, tread­ing the earth proudly, with a slight jin­gle and flash of bar­barous or­na­ments. She car­ried her head high; her hair was done in the shape of a hel­met; she had brass leg­gings to the knee, brass wire gauntlets to the el­bow, a crim­son spot on her tawny cheek, in­nu­mer­able neck­laces of glass beads on her neck; bizarre things, charms, gifts of witch-men, that hung about her, glit­tered and trem­bled at ev­ery step. She must have had the value of sev­eral ele­phant tusks upon her. She was sav­age and su­perb, wild-eyed and mag­nif­i­cent; there was some­thing omi­nous and stately in her de­lib­er­ate progress. And in the hush that had fallen sud­denly upon the whole sor­row­ful land, the im­mense wilder­ness, the colos­sal body of the fe­cund and mys­te­ri­ous life seemed to look at her, pen­sive, as though it had been look­ing at the im­age of its own tene­brous and pas­sion­ate soul.

“She came abreast of the steamer, stood still, and faced us. Her long shadow fell to the wa­ter’s edge. Her face had a tragic and fierce as­pect of wild sor­row and of dumb pain min­gled with the fear of some strug­gling, half-shaped re­solve. She stood look­ing at us with­out a stir, and like the wilder­ness it­self, with an air of brood­ing over an in­scrutable pur­pose. A whole minute passed, and then she made a step for­ward. There was a low jin­gle, a glint of yel­low metal, a sway of fringed draperies, and she stopped as if her heart had failed her. The young fel­low by my side growled. The pil­grims mur­mured at my back. She looked at us all as if her life had de­pended upon the unswerv­ing steadi­ness of her glance. Sud­denly she opened her bared arms and threw them up rigid above her head, as though in an un­con­trol­lable de­sire to touch the sky, and at the same time the swift shad­ows darted out on the earth, swept around on the river, gath­er­ing the steamer into a shad­owy em­brace. A for­mi­da­ble si­lence hung over the scene.

“She turned away slowly, walked on, fol­low­ing the bank, and passed into the bushes to the left. Once only her eyes gleamed back at us in the dusk of the thick­ets be­fore she dis­ap­peared.

“ ‘If she had of­fered to come aboard I re­ally think I would have tried to shoot her,’ said the man of patches, ner­vously. ‘I have been risk­ing my life ev­ery day for the last fort­night to keep her out of the house. She got in one day and kicked up a row about those mis­er­able rags I picked up in the store­room to mend my clothes with. I wasn’t de­cent. At least it must have been that, for she talked like a fury to Kurtz for an hour, point­ing at me now and then. I don’t un­der­stand the di­alect of this tribe. Luck­ily for me, I fancy Kurtz felt too ill that day to care, or there would have been mis­chief. I don’t un­der­stand. … No—it’s too much for me. Ah, well, it’s all over now.’

“At this mo­ment I heard Kurtz’s deep voice be­hind the cur­tain: ‘Save me!—save the ivory, you mean. Don’t tell me. Save me! Why, I’ve had to save you. You are in­ter­rupt­ing my plans now. Sick! Sick! Not so sick as you would like to be­lieve. Never mind. I’ll carry my ideas out yet—I will re­turn. I’ll show you what can be done. You with your lit­tle ped­dling no­tions—you are in­ter­fer­ing with me. I will re­turn. I. …’

“The man­ager came out. He did me the hon­our to take me un­der the arm and lead me aside. ‘He is very low, very low,’ he said. He con­sid­ered it nec­es­sary to sigh, but ne­glected to be con­sis­tently sor­row­ful. ‘We have done all we could for him—haven’t we? But there is no dis­guis­ing the fact, Mr. Kurtz has done more harm than good to the Com­pany. He did not see the time was not ripe for vig­or­ous ac­tion. Cau­tiously, cau­tiously—that’s my prin­ci­ple. We must be cau­tious yet. The dis­trict is closed to us for a time. De­plorable! Upon the whole, the trade will suf­fer. I don’t deny there is a re­mark­able quan­tity of ivory—mostly fos­sil. We must save it, at all events—but look how pre­car­i­ous the po­si­tion is—and why? Be­cause the method is un­sound.’ ‘Do you,’ said I, look­ing at the shore, ‘call it “un­sound method?” ’ ‘Without doubt,’ he ex­claimed hotly. ‘Don’t you?’ … ‘No method at all,’ I mur­mured af­ter a while. ‘Ex­actly,’ he ex­ulted. ‘I an­tic­i­pated this. Shows a com­plete want of judg­ment. It is my duty to point it out in the proper quar­ter.’ ‘Oh,’ said I, ‘that fel­low—what’s his name?—the brick­maker, will make a read­able re­port for you.’ He ap­peared con­founded for a mo­ment. It seemed to me I had never breathed an at­mos­phere so vile, and I turned men­tally to Kurtz for re­lief—pos­i­tively for re­lief. ‘Nev­er­the­less I think Mr. Kurtz is a re­mark­able man,’ I said with em­pha­sis. He started, dropped on me a heavy glance, said very qui­etly, ‘he was,’ and turned his back on me. My hour of favour was over; I found my­self lumped along with Kurtz as a par­ti­san of meth­ods for which the time was not ripe: I was un­sound! Ah! but it was some­thing to have at least a choice of night­mares.

“I had turned to the wilder­ness re­ally, not to Mr. Kurtz, who, I was ready to ad­mit, was as good as buried. And for a mo­ment it seemed to me as if I also were buried in a vast grave full of un­speak­able se­crets. I felt an in­tol­er­a­ble weight op­press­ing my breast, the smell of the damp earth, the un­seen pres­ence of vic­to­ri­ous cor­rup­tion, the dark­ness of an im­pen­e­tra­ble night. … The Rus­sian tapped me on the shoul­der. I heard him mum­bling and stam­mer­ing some­thing about ‘brother sea­man—couldn’t con­ceal—knowl­edge of mat­ters that would af­fect Mr. Kurtz’s rep­u­ta­tion.’ I waited. For him ev­i­dently Mr. Kurtz was not in his grave; I sus­pect that for him Mr. Kurtz was one of the im­mor­tals. ‘Well!’ said I at last, ‘speak out. As it hap­pens, I am Mr. Kurtz’s friend—in a way.’

“He stated with a good deal of for­mal­ity that had we not been ‘of the same pro­fes­sion,’ he would have kept the mat­ter to him­self with­out re­gard to con­se­quences. ‘He sus­pected there was an ac­tive ill-will to­wards him on the part of these white men that—’ ‘You are right,’ I said, re­mem­ber­ing a cer­tain con­ver­sa­tion I had over­heard. ‘The man­ager thinks you ought to be hanged.’ He showed a con­cern at this in­tel­li­gence which amused me at first. ‘I had bet­ter get out of the way qui­etly,’ he said earnestly. ‘I can do no more for Kurtz now, and they would soon find some ex­cuse. What’s to stop them? There’s a mil­i­tary post three hun­dred miles from here.’ ‘Well, upon my word,’ said I, ‘per­haps you had bet­ter go if you have any friends amongst the sav­ages near by.’ ‘Plenty,’ he said. ‘They are sim­ple peo­ple—and I want noth­ing, you know.’ He stood bit­ing his lip, then: ‘I don’t want any harm to hap­pen to these whites here, but of course I was think­ing of Mr. Kurtz’s rep­u­ta­tion—but you are a brother sea­man and—’ ‘All right,’ said I, af­ter a time. ‘Mr. Kurtz’s rep­u­ta­tion is safe with me.’ I did not know how truly I spoke.

“He in­formed me, low­er­ing his voice, that it was Kurtz who had or­dered the at­tack to be made on the steamer. ‘He hated some­times the idea of be­ing taken away—and then again. … But I don’t un­der­stand these mat­ters. I am a sim­ple man. He thought it would scare you away—that you would give it up, think­ing him dead. I could not stop him. Oh, I had an aw­ful time of it this last month.’ ‘Very well,’ I said. ‘He is all right now.’ ‘Ye-e-es,’ he mut­tered, not very con­vinced ap­par­ently. ‘Thanks,’ said I; ‘I shall keep my eyes open.’ ‘But quiet—eh?’ he urged anx­iously. ‘It would be aw­ful for his rep­u­ta­tion if any­body here—’ I promised a com­plete dis­cre­tion with great grav­ity. ‘I have a ca­noe and three black fel­lows wait­ing not very far. I am off. Could you give me a few Mar­tini-Henry car­tridges?’ I could, and did, with proper se­crecy. He helped him­self, with a wink at me, to a hand­ful of my to­bacco. ‘Between sailors—you know—good English to­bacco.’ At the door of the pi­lot­house he turned round—‘I say, haven’t you a pair of shoes you could spare?’ He raised one leg. ‘Look.’ The soles were tied with knot­ted strings san­dal­wise un­der his bare feet. I rooted out an old pair, at which he looked with ad­mi­ra­tion be­fore tuck­ing it un­der his left arm. One of his pock­ets (bright red) was bulging with car­tridges, from the other (dark blue) peeped ‘Tow­son’s In­quiry,’ etc., etc. He seemed to think him­self ex­cel­lently well equipped for a re­newed en­counter with the wilder­ness. ‘Ah! I’ll never, never meet such a man again. You ought to have heard him re­cite po­etry—his own, too, it was, he told me. Poetry!’ He rolled his eyes at the rec­ol­lec­tion of these de­lights. ‘Oh, he en­larged my mind!’ ‘Good­bye,’ said I. He shook hands and van­ished in the night. Some­times I ask my­self whether I had ever re­ally seen him—whether it was pos­si­ble to meet such a phe­nom­e­non! …

“When I woke up shortly af­ter mid­night his warn­ing came to my mind with its hint of dan­ger that seemed, in the starred dark­ness, real enough to make me get up for the pur­pose of hav­ing a look round. On the hill a big fire burned, il­lu­mi­nat­ing fit­fully a crooked cor­ner of the sta­tion-house. One of the agents with a picket of a few of our blacks, armed for the pur­pose, was keep­ing guard over the ivory; but deep within the for­est, red gleams that wa­vered, that seemed to sink and rise from the ground amongst con­fused colum­nar shapes of in­tense black­ness, showed the ex­act po­si­tion of the camp where Mr. Kurtz’s ador­ers were keep­ing their un­easy vigil. The mo­not­o­nous beat­ing of a big drum filled the air with muf­fled shocks and a lin­ger­ing vi­bra­tion. A steady dron­ing sound of many men chant­ing each to him­self some weird in­can­ta­tion came out from the black, flat wall of the woods as the hum­ming of bees comes out of a hive, and had a strange nar­cotic ef­fect upon my half-awake senses. I be­lieve I dozed off lean­ing over the rail, till an abrupt burst of yells, an over­whelm­ing out­break of a pent-up and mys­te­ri­ous frenzy, woke me up in a be­wil­dered won­der. It was cut short all at once, and the low dron­ing went on with an ef­fect of au­di­ble and sooth­ing si­lence. I glanced ca­su­ally into the lit­tle cabin. A light was burn­ing within, but Mr. Kurtz was not there.

“I think I would have raised an out­cry if I had be­lieved my eyes. But I didn’t be­lieve them at first—the thing seemed so im­pos­si­ble. The fact is I was com­pletely un­nerved by a sheer blank fright, pure ab­stract ter­ror, un­con­nected with any dis­tinct shape of phys­i­cal dan­ger. What made this emo­tion so over­pow­er­ing was—how shall I de­fine it?—the moral shock I re­ceived, as if some­thing al­to­gether mon­strous, in­tol­er­a­ble to thought and odi­ous to the soul, had been thrust upon me un­ex­pect­edly. This lasted of course the mer­est frac­tion of a sec­ond, and then the usual sense of com­mon­place, deadly dan­ger, the pos­si­bil­ity of a sud­den on­slaught and mas­sacre, or some­thing of the kind, which I saw im­pend­ing, was pos­i­tively wel­come and com­pos­ing. It paci­fied me, in fact, so much that I did not raise an alarm.

“There was an agent but­toned up in­side an ul­ster and sleep­ing on a chair on deck within three feet of me. The yells had not awak­ened him; he snored very slightly; I left him to his slum­bers and leaped ashore. I did not be­tray Mr. Kurtz—it was or­dered I should never be­tray him—it was writ­ten I should be loyal to the night­mare of my choice. I was anx­ious to deal with this shadow by my­self alone—and to this day I don’t know why I was so jeal­ous of shar­ing with any­one the pe­cu­liar black­ness of that ex­pe­ri­ence.

“As soon as I got on the bank I saw a trail—a broad trail through the grass. I re­mem­ber the ex­ul­ta­tion with which I said to my­self, ‘He can’t walk—he is crawl­ing on all-fours—I’ve got him.’ The grass was wet with dew. I strode rapidly with clenched fists. I fancy I had some vague no­tion of fall­ing upon him and giv­ing him a drub­bing. I don’t know. I had some im­be­cile thoughts. The knit­ting old woman with the cat ob­truded her­self upon my mem­ory as a most im­proper per­son to be sit­ting at the other end of such an af­fair. I saw a row of pil­grims squirt­ing lead in the air out of Winch­esters held to the hip. I thought I would never get back to the steamer, and imag­ined my­self liv­ing alone and un­armed in the woods to an ad­vanced age. Such silly things—you know. And I re­mem­ber I con­founded the beat of the drum with the beat­ing of my heart, and was pleased at its calm reg­u­lar­ity.

“I kept to the track though—then stopped to lis­ten. The night was very clear; a dark blue space, sparkling with dew and starlight, in which black things stood very still. I thought I could see a kind of mo­tion ahead of me. I was strangely cock­sure of ev­ery­thing that night. I ac­tu­ally left the track and ran in a wide semi­cir­cle (I ver­ily be­lieve chuck­ling to my­self) so as to get in front of that stir, of that mo­tion I had seen—if in­deed I had seen any­thing. I was cir­cum­vent­ing Kurtz as though it had been a boy­ish game.

“I came upon him, and, if he had not heard me com­ing, I would have fallen over him, too, but he got up in time. He rose, un­steady, long, pale, in­dis­tinct, like a vapour ex­haled by the earth, and swayed slightly, misty and silent be­fore me; while at my back the fires loomed be­tween the trees, and the mur­mur of many voices is­sued from the for­est. I had cut him off clev­erly; but when ac­tu­ally con­fronting him I seemed to come to my senses, I saw the dan­ger in its right pro­por­tion. It was by no means over yet. Sup­pose he be­gan to shout? Though he could hardly stand, there was still plenty of vigour in his voice. ‘Go away—hide your­self,’ he said, in that pro­found tone. It was very aw­ful. I glanced back. We were within thirty yards from the near­est fire. A black fig­ure stood up, strode on long black legs, wav­ing long black arms, across the glow. It had horns—an­te­lope horns, I think—on its head. Some sor­cerer, some witch-man, no doubt: it looked fiend­like enough. ‘Do you know what you are do­ing?’ I whis­pered. ‘Per­fectly,’ he an­swered, rais­ing his voice for that sin­gle word: it sounded to me far off and yet loud, like a hail through a speak­ing-trum­pet. ‘If he makes a row we are lost,’ I thought to my­self. This clearly was not a case for fisticuffs, even apart from the very nat­u­ral aver­sion I had to beat that Shadow—this wan­der­ing and tor­mented thing. ‘You will be lost,’ I said—‘ut­terly lost.’ One gets some­times such a flash of in­spi­ra­tion, you know. I did say the right thing, though in­deed he could not have been more ir­re­triev­ably lost than he was at this very mo­ment, when the foun­da­tions of our in­ti­macy were be­ing laid—to en­dure—to en­dure—even to the end—even be­yond.

“ ‘I had im­mense plans,’ he mut­tered ir­res­o­lutely. ‘Yes,’ said I; ‘but if you try to shout I’ll smash your head with—’ There was not a stick or a stone near. ‘I will throt­tle you for good,’ I cor­rected my­self. ‘I was on the thresh­old of great things,’ he pleaded, in a voice of long­ing, with a wist­ful­ness of tone that made my blood run cold. ‘And now for this stupid scoundrel—’ ‘Your suc­cess in Europe is as­sured in any case,’ I af­firmed steadily. I did not want to have the throt­tling of him, you un­der­stand—and in­deed it would have been very lit­tle use for any prac­ti­cal pur­pose. I tried to break the spell—the heavy, mute spell of the wilder­ness—that seemed to draw him to its piti­less breast by the awak­en­ing of for­got­ten and bru­tal in­stincts, by the mem­ory of grat­i­fied and mon­strous pas­sions. This alone, I was con­vinced, had driven him out to the edge of the for­est, to the bush, to­wards the gleam of fires, the throb of drums, the drone of weird in­can­ta­tions; this alone had be­guiled his un­law­ful soul be­yond the bounds of per­mit­ted as­pi­ra­tions. And, don’t you see, the ter­ror of the po­si­tion was not in be­ing knocked on the head—though I had a very lively sense of that dan­ger, too—but in this, that I had to deal with a be­ing to whom I could not ap­peal in the name of any­thing high or low. I had, even like the nig­gers, to in­voke him—him­self—his own ex­alted and in­cred­i­ble degra­da­tion. There was noth­ing ei­ther above or be­low him, and I knew it. He had kicked him­self loose of the earth. Con­found the man! he had kicked the very earth to pieces. He was alone, and I be­fore him did not know whether I stood on the ground or floated in the air. I’ve been telling you what we said—re­peat­ing the phrases we pro­nounced—but what’s the good? They were com­mon ev­ery­day words—the fa­mil­iar, vague sounds ex­changed on ev­ery wak­ing day of life. But what of that? They had be­hind them, to my mind, the ter­rific sug­ges­tive­ness of words heard in dreams, of phrases spo­ken in night­mares. Soul! If any­body ever strug­gled with a soul, I am the man. And I wasn’t ar­gu­ing with a lu­natic ei­ther. Believe me or not, his in­tel­li­gence was per­fectly clear—con­cen­trated, it is true, upon him­self with hor­ri­ble in­ten­sity, yet clear; and therein was my only chance—bar­ring, of course, the killing him there and then, which wasn’t so good, on ac­count of un­avoid­able noise. But his soul was mad. Be­ing alone in the wilder­ness, it had looked within it­self, and, by heav­ens! I tell you, it had gone mad. I had—for my sins, I sup­pose—to go through the or­deal of look­ing into it my­self. No elo­quence could have been so with­er­ing to one’s be­lief in mankind as his fi­nal burst of sin­cer­ity. He strug­gled with him­self, too. I saw it—I heard it. I saw the in­con­ceiv­able mys­tery of a soul that knew no re­straint, no faith, and no fear, yet strug­gling blindly with it­self. I kept my head pretty well; but when I had him at last stretched on the couch, I wiped my fore­head, while my legs shook un­der me as though I had car­ried half a ton on my back down that hill. And yet I had only sup­ported him, his bony arm clasped round my neck—and he was not much heav­ier than a child.

“When next day we left at noon, the crowd, of whose pres­ence be­hind the cur­tain of trees I had been acutely con­scious all the time, flowed out of the woods again, filled the clear­ing, cov­ered the slope with a mass of naked, breath­ing, quiv­er­ing, bronze bod­ies. I steamed up a bit, then swung down stream, and two thou­sand eyes fol­lowed the evo­lu­tions of the splash­ing, thump­ing, fierce river-de­mon beat­ing the wa­ter with its ter­ri­ble tail and breath­ing black smoke into the air. In front of the first rank, along the river, three men, plas­tered with bright red earth from head to foot, strut­ted to and fro rest­lessly. When we came abreast again, they faced the river, stamped their feet, nod­ded their horned heads, swayed their scar­let bod­ies; they shook to­wards the fierce river-de­mon a bunch of black feath­ers, a mangy skin with a pen­dent tail—some­thing that looked a dried gourd; they shouted pe­ri­od­i­cally to­gether strings of amaz­ing words that re­sem­bled no sounds of hu­man lan­guage; and the deep mur­murs of the crowd, in­ter­rupted sud­denly, were like the re­sponses of some sa­tanic litany.

“We had car­ried Kurtz into the pi­lot­house: there was more air there. Ly­ing on the couch, he stared through the open shut­ter. There was an eddy in the mass of hu­man bod­ies, and the woman with hel­meted head and tawny cheeks rushed out to the very brink of the stream. She put out her hands, shouted some­thing, and all that wild mob took up the shout in a roar­ing cho­rus of ar­tic­u­lated, rapid, breath­less ut­ter­ance.

“ ‘Do you un­der­stand this?’ I asked.

“He kept on look­ing out past me with fiery, long­ing eyes, with a min­gled ex­pres­sion of wist­ful­ness and hate. He made no an­swer, but I saw a smile, a smile of in­de­fin­able mean­ing, ap­pear on his colour­less lips that a mo­ment af­ter twitched con­vul­sively. ‘Do I not?’ he said slowly, gasp­ing, as if the words had been torn out of him by a su­per­nat­u­ral power.

“I pulled the string of the whis­tle, and I did this be­cause I saw the pil­grims on deck get­ting out their ri­fles with an air of an­tic­i­pat­ing a jolly lark. At the sud­den screech there was a move­ment of ab­ject ter­ror through that wedged mass of bod­ies. ‘Don’t! don’t you frighten them away,’ cried some­one on deck dis­con­so­lately. I pulled the string time af­ter time. They broke and ran, they leaped, they crouched, they swerved, they dodged the fly­ing ter­ror of the sound. The three red chaps had fallen flat, face down on the shore, as though they had been shot dead. Only the bar­barous and su­perb woman did not so much as flinch, and stretched trag­i­cally her bare arms af­ter us over the som­bre and glit­ter­ing river.

“And then that im­be­cile crowd down on the deck started their lit­tle fun, and I could see noth­ing more for smoke.

“The brown cur­rent ran swiftly out of the heart of dark­ness, bear­ing us down to­wards the sea with twice the speed of our up­ward progress; and Kurtz’s life was run­ning swiftly, too, ebbing, ebbing out of his heart into the sea of in­ex­orable time. The man­ager was very placid, he had no vi­tal anx­i­eties now, he took us both in with a com­pre­hen­sive and sat­is­fied glance: the ‘af­fair’ had come off as well as could be wished. I saw the time ap­proach­ing when I would be left alone of the party of ‘un­sound method.’ The pil­grims looked upon me with dis­favour. I was, so to speak, num­bered with the dead. It is strange how I ac­cepted this un­fore­seen part­ner­ship, this choice of night­mares forced upon me in the tene­brous land in­vaded by these mean and greedy phan­toms.

“Kurtz dis­coursed. A voice! a voice! It rang deep to the very last. It sur­vived his strength to hide in the mag­nif­i­cent folds of elo­quence the bar­ren dark­ness of his heart. Oh, he strug­gled! he strug­gled! The wastes of his weary brain were haunted by shad­owy im­ages now—im­ages of wealth and fame re­volv­ing ob­se­quiously round his un­ex­tin­guish­able gift of no­ble and lofty ex­pres­sion. My In­tended, my sta­tion, my ca­reer, my ideas—these were the sub­jects for the oc­ca­sional ut­ter­ances of el­e­vated sen­ti­ments. The shade of the orig­i­nal Kurtz fre­quented the bed­side of the hol­low sham, whose fate it was to be buried presently in the mould of primeval earth. But both the di­a­bolic love and the un­earthly hate of the mys­ter­ies it had pen­e­trated fought for the pos­ses­sion of that soul sa­ti­ated with prim­i­tive emo­tions, avid of ly­ing fame, of sham dis­tinc­tion, of all the ap­pear­ances of suc­cess and power.

“Some­times he was con­temptibly child­ish. He de­sired to have kings meet him at rail­way-sta­tions on his re­turn from some ghastly Nowhere, where he in­tended to ac­com­plish great things. ‘You show them you have in you some­thing that is re­ally prof­itable, and then there will be no lim­its to the recog­ni­tion of your abil­ity,’ he would say. ‘Of course you must take care of the mo­tives—right mo­tives—al­ways.’ The long reaches that were like one and the same reach, mo­not­o­nous bends that were ex­actly alike, slipped past the steamer with their mul­ti­tude of sec­u­lar trees look­ing pa­tiently af­ter this grimy frag­ment of an­other world, the fore­run­ner of change, of con­quest, of trade, of mas­sacres, of bless­ings. I looked ahead—pi­lot­ing. ‘Close the shut­ter,’ said Kurtz sud­denly one day; ‘I can’t bear to look at this.’ I did so. There was a si­lence. ‘Oh, but I will wring your heart yet!’ he cried at the in­vis­i­ble wilder­ness.

“We broke down—as I had ex­pected—and had to lie up for re­pairs at the head of an is­land. This de­lay was the first thing that shook Kurtz’s con­fi­dence. One morn­ing he gave me a packet of pa­pers and a pho­to­graph—the lot tied to­gether with a shoe­string. ‘Keep this for me,’ he said. ‘This nox­ious fool’ (mean­ing the man­ager) ‘is ca­pa­ble of pry­ing into my boxes when I am not look­ing.’ In the af­ter­noon I saw him. He was ly­ing on his back with closed eyes, and I with­drew qui­etly, but I heard him mut­ter, ‘Live rightly, die, die …’ I lis­tened. There was noth­ing more. Was he re­hears­ing some speech in his sleep, or was it a frag­ment of a phrase from some news­pa­per ar­ti­cle? He had been writ­ing for the pa­pers and meant to do so again, ‘for the fur­ther­ing of my ideas. It’s a duty.’

“His was an im­pen­e­tra­ble dark­ness. I looked at him as you peer down at a man who is ly­ing at the bot­tom of a precipice where the sun never shines. But I had not much time to give him, be­cause I was help­ing the en­gine-driver to take to pieces the leaky cylin­ders, to straighten a bent con­nect­ing-rod, and in other such mat­ters. I lived in an in­fer­nal mess of rust, fil­ings, nuts, bolts, span­ners, ham­mers, ratchet-drills—things I abom­i­nate, be­cause I don’t get on with them. I tended the lit­tle forge we for­tu­nately had aboard; I toiled wearily in a wretched scrapheap—un­less I had the shakes too bad to stand.

“One evening com­ing in with a can­dle I was star­tled to hear him say a lit­tle tremu­lously, ‘I am ly­ing here in the dark wait­ing for death.’ The light was within a foot of his eyes. I forced my­self to mur­mur, ‘Oh, non­sense!’ and stood over him as if trans­fixed.

“Any­thing ap­proach­ing the change that came over his fea­tures I have never seen be­fore, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn’t touched. I was fas­ci­nated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the ex­pres­sion of som­bre pride, of ruth­less power, of craven ter­ror—of an in­tense and hope­less de­spair. Did he live his life again in ev­ery de­tail of de­sire, temp­ta­tion, and sur­ren­der dur­ing that supreme mo­ment of com­plete knowl­edge? He cried in a whis­per at some im­age, at some vi­sion—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath:

“ ‘The hor­ror! The hor­ror!’

“I blew the can­dle out and left the cabin. The pil­grims were din­ing in the mess­room, and I took my place op­po­site the man­ager, who lifted his eyes to give me a ques­tion­ing glance, which I suc­cess­fully ig­nored. He leaned back, serene, with that pe­cu­liar smile of his seal­ing the un­ex­pressed depths of his mean­ness. A con­tin­u­ous shower of small flies streamed upon the lamp, upon the cloth, upon our hands and faces. Sud­denly the man­ager’s boy put his in­so­lent black head in the door­way, and said in a tone of scathing con­tempt:

“ ‘Mis­tah Kurtz—he dead.’

“All the pil­grims rushed out to see. I re­mained, and went on with my din­ner. I be­lieve I was con­sid­ered bru­tally cal­lous. How­ever, I did not eat much. There was a lamp in there—light, don’t you know—and out­side it was so beastly, beastly dark. I went no more near the re­mark­able man who had pro­nounced a judg­ment upon the ad­ven­tures of his soul on this earth. The voice was gone. What else had been there? But I am of course aware that next day the pil­grims buried some­thing in a muddy hole.

“And then they very nearly buried me.

“How­ever, as you see, I did not go to join Kurtz there and then. I did not. I re­mained to dream the night­mare out to the end, and to show my loy­alty to Kurtz once more. Destiny. My des­tiny! Droll thing life is—that mys­te­ri­ous ar­range­ment of mer­ci­less logic for a fu­tile pur­pose. The most you can hope from it is some knowl­edge of your­self—that comes too late—a crop of un­ex­tin­guish­able re­grets. I have wres­tled with death. It is the most un­ex­cit­ing con­test you can imag­ine. It takes place in an im­pal­pa­ble grey­ness, with noth­ing un­der­foot, with noth­ing around, with­out spec­ta­tors, with­out clam­our, with­out glory, with­out the great de­sire of vic­tory, with­out the great fear of de­feat, in a sickly at­mos­phere of tepid scep­ti­cism, with­out much be­lief in your own right, and still less in that of your ad­ver­sary. If such is the form of ul­ti­mate wis­dom, then life is a greater rid­dle than some of us think it to be. I was within a hair’s breadth of the last op­por­tu­nity for pro­nounce­ment, and I found with hu­mil­i­a­tion that prob­a­bly I would have noth­ing to say. This is the rea­son why I af­firm that Kurtz was a re­mark­able man. He had some­thing to say. He said it. Since I had peeped over the edge my­self, I un­der­stand bet­ter the mean­ing of his stare, that could not see the flame of the can­dle, but was wide enough to em­brace the whole uni­verse, pierc­ing enough to pen­e­trate all the hearts that beat in the dark­ness. He had summed up—he had judged. ‘The hor­ror!’ He was a re­mark­able man. After all, this was the ex­pres­sion of some sort of be­lief; it had can­dour, it had con­vic­tion, it had a vi­brat­ing note of re­volt in its whis­per, it had the ap­palling face of a glimpsed truth—the strange com­min­gling of de­sire and hate. And it is not my own ex­trem­ity I re­mem­ber best—a vi­sion of grey­ness with­out form filled with phys­i­cal pain, and a care­less con­tempt for the evanes­cence of all things—even of this pain it­self. No! It is his ex­trem­ity that I seem to have lived through. True, he had made that last stride, he had stepped over the edge, while I had been per­mit­ted to draw back my hes­i­tat­ing foot. And per­haps in this is the whole dif­fer­ence; per­haps all the wis­dom, and all truth, and all sin­cer­ity, are just com­pressed into that in­ap­pre­cia­ble mo­ment of time in which we step over the thresh­old of the in­vis­i­ble. Per­haps! I like to think my sum­ming-up would not have been a word of care­less con­tempt. Bet­ter his cry—much bet­ter. It was an af­fir­ma­tion, a moral vic­tory paid for by in­nu­mer­able de­feats, by abom­inable ter­rors, by abom­inable sat­is­fac­tions. But it was a vic­tory! That is why I have re­mained loyal to Kurtz to the last, and even be­yond, when a long time af­ter I heard once more, not his own voice, but the echo of his mag­nif­i­cent elo­quence thrown to me from a soul as translu­cently pure as a cliff of crys­tal.

“No, they did not bury me, though there is a pe­riod of time which I re­mem­ber mist­ily, with a shud­der­ing won­der, like a pas­sage through some in­con­ceiv­able world that had no hope in it and no de­sire. I found my­self back in the sepul­chral city re­sent­ing the sight of peo­ple hur­ry­ing through the streets to filch a lit­tle money from each other, to de­vour their in­fa­mous cook­ery, to gulp their un­whole­some beer, to dream their in­signif­i­cant and silly dreams. They tres­passed upon my thoughts. They were in­trud­ers whose knowl­edge of life was to me an ir­ri­tat­ing pre­tence, be­cause I felt so sure they could not pos­si­bly know the things I knew. Their bear­ing, which was sim­ply the bear­ing of com­mon­place in­di­vid­u­als go­ing about their busi­ness in the as­sur­ance of per­fect safety, was of­fen­sive to me like the out­ra­geous flaunt­ings of folly in the face of a dan­ger it is un­able to com­pre­hend. I had no par­tic­u­lar de­sire to en­lighten them, but I had some dif­fi­culty in re­strain­ing my­self from laugh­ing in their faces so full of stupid im­por­tance. I dare­say I was not very well at that time. I tot­tered about the streets—there were var­i­ous af­fairs to set­tle—grin­ning bit­terly at per­fectly re­spectable per­sons. I ad­mit my be­hav­iour was in­ex­cus­able, but then my tem­per­a­ture was sel­dom nor­mal in these days. My dear aunt’s en­deav­ours to ‘nurse up my strength’ seemed al­to­gether be­side the mark. It was not my strength that wanted nurs­ing, it was my imag­i­na­tion that wanted sooth­ing. I kept the bun­dle of pa­pers given me by Kurtz, not know­ing ex­actly what to do with it. His mother had died lately, watched over, as I was told, by his In­tended. A clean-shaved man, with an of­fi­cial man­ner and wear­ing gold-rimmed spec­ta­cles, called on me one day and made in­quiries, at first cir­cuitous, af­ter­wards suavely press­ing, about what he was pleased to de­nom­i­nate cer­tain ‘doc­u­ments.’ I was not sur­prised, be­cause I had had two rows with the man­ager on the sub­ject out there. I had re­fused to give up the small­est scrap out of that pack­age, and I took the same at­ti­tude with the spec­ta­cled man. He be­came darkly men­ac­ing at last, and with much heat ar­gued that the Com­pany had the right to ev­ery bit of in­for­ma­tion about its ‘ter­ri­to­ries.’ And said he, ‘Mr. Kurtz’s knowl­edge of un­ex­plored re­gions must have been nec­es­sar­ily ex­ten­sive and pe­cu­liar—ow­ing to his great abil­i­ties and to the de­plorable cir­cum­stances in which he had been placed: there­fore—’ I as­sured him Mr. Kurtz’s knowl­edge, how­ever ex­ten­sive, did not bear upon the prob­lems of com­merce or ad­min­is­tra­tion. He in­voked then the name of sci­ence. ‘It would be an in­cal­cu­la­ble loss if,’ etc., etc. I of­fered him the re­port on the ‘Sup­pres­sion of Sav­age Cus­toms,’ with the postscrip­tum torn off. He took it up ea­gerly, but ended by sniff­ing at it with an air of con­tempt. ‘This is not what we had a right to ex­pect,’ he re­marked. ‘Ex­pect noth­ing else,’ I said. ‘There are only pri­vate let­ters.’ He with­drew upon some threat of le­gal pro­ceed­ings, and I saw him no more; but an­other fel­low, call­ing him­self Kurtz’s cousin, ap­peared two days later, and was anx­ious to hear all the de­tails about his dear rel­a­tive’s last mo­ments. In­ci­den­tally he gave me to un­der­stand that Kurtz had been es­sen­tially a great mu­si­cian. ‘There was the mak­ing of an im­mense suc­cess,’ said the man, who was an or­gan­ist, I be­lieve, with lank grey hair flow­ing over a greasy coat-col­lar. I had no rea­son to doubt his state­ment; and to this day I am un­able to say what was Kurtz’s pro­fes­sion, whether he ever had any—which was the great­est of his tal­ents. I had taken him for a painter who wrote for the pa­pers, or else for a jour­nal­ist who could paint—but even the cousin (who took snuff dur­ing the in­ter­view) could not tell me what he had been—ex­actly. He was a uni­ver­sal ge­nius—on that point I agreed with the old chap, who there­upon blew his nose nois­ily into a large cot­ton hand­ker­chief and with­drew in se­nile ag­i­ta­tion, bear­ing off some fam­ily let­ters and mem­o­randa with­out im­por­tance. Ul­ti­mately a jour­nal­ist anx­ious to know some­thing of the fate of his ‘dear col­league’ turned up. This vis­i­tor in­formed me Kurtz’s proper sphere ought to have been pol­i­tics ‘on the pop­u­lar side.’ He had furry straight eye­brows, bristly hair cropped short, an eye­glass on a broad rib­bon, and, be­com­ing ex­pan­sive, con­fessed his opin­ion that Kurtz re­ally couldn’t write a bit—‘but heav­ens! how that man could talk. He elec­tri­fied large meet­ings. He had faith—don’t you see?—he had the faith. He could get him­self to be­lieve any­thing—any­thing. He would have been a splen­did leader of an ex­treme party.’ ‘What party?’ I asked. ‘Any party,’ an­swered the other. ‘He was an—an—ex­trem­ist.’ Did I not think so? I as­sented. Did I know, he asked, with a sud­den flash of cu­rios­ity, ‘what it was that had in­duced him to go out there?’ ‘Yes,’ said I, and forth­with handed him the fa­mous Re­port for pub­li­ca­tion, if he thought fit. He glanced through it hur­riedly, mum­bling all the time, judged ‘it would do,’ and took him­self off with this plun­der.

“Thus I was left at last with a slim packet of let­ters and the girl’s por­trait. She struck me as beau­ti­ful—I mean she had a beau­ti­ful ex­pres­sion. I know that the sun­light can be made to lie, too, yet one felt that no ma­nip­u­la­tion of light and pose could have con­veyed the del­i­cate shade of truth­ful­ness upon those fea­tures. She seemed ready to lis­ten with­out men­tal reser­va­tion, with­out sus­pi­cion, with­out a thought for her­self. I con­cluded I would go and give her back her por­trait and those let­ters my­self. Cu­rios­ity? Yes; and also some other feel­ing per­haps. All that had been Kurtz’s had passed out of my hands: his soul, his body, his sta­tion, his plans, his ivory, his ca­reer. There re­mained only his mem­ory and his In­tended—and I wanted to give that up, too, to the past, in a way—to sur­ren­der per­son­ally all that re­mained of him with me to that obliv­ion which is the last word of our com­mon fate. I don’t de­fend my­self. I had no clear per­cep­tion of what it was I re­ally wanted. Per­haps it was an im­pulse of un­con­scious loy­alty, or the ful­fil­ment of one of those ironic ne­ces­si­ties that lurk in the facts of hu­man ex­is­tence. I don’t know. I can’t tell. But I went.

“I thought his mem­ory was like the other mem­o­ries of the dead that ac­cu­mu­late in ev­ery man’s life—a vague im­press on the brain of shad­ows that had fallen on it in their swift and fi­nal pas­sage; but be­fore the high and pon­der­ous door, be­tween the tall houses of a street as still and deco­rous as a well-kept al­ley in a ceme­tery, I had a vi­sion of him on the stretcher, open­ing his mouth vo­ra­ciously, as if to de­vour all the earth with all its mankind. He lived then be­fore me; he lived as much as he had ever lived—a shadow in­sa­tiable of splen­did ap­pear­ances, of fright­ful re­al­i­ties; a shadow darker than the shadow of the night, and draped nobly in the folds of a gor­geous elo­quence. The vi­sion seemed to en­ter the house with me—the stretcher, the phan­tom-bear­ers, the wild crowd of obe­di­ent wor­ship­pers, the gloom of the forests, the glit­ter of the reach be­tween the murky bends, the beat of the drum, reg­u­lar and muf­fled like the beat­ing of a heart—the heart of a con­quer­ing dark­ness. It was a mo­ment of tri­umph for the wilder­ness, an in­vad­ing and venge­ful rush which, it seemed to me, I would have to keep back alone for the sal­va­tion of an­other soul. And the mem­ory of what I had heard him say afar there, with the horned shapes stir­ring at my back, in the glow of fires, within the pa­tient woods, those bro­ken phrases came back to me, were heard again in their omi­nous and ter­ri­fy­ing sim­plic­ity. I re­mem­bered his ab­ject plead­ing, his ab­ject threats, the colos­sal scale of his vile de­sires, the mean­ness, the tor­ment, the tem­pes­tu­ous an­guish of his soul. And later on I seemed to see his col­lected lan­guid man­ner, when he said one day, ‘This lot of ivory now is re­ally mine. The Com­pany did not pay for it. I col­lected it my­self at a very great per­sonal risk. I am afraid they will try to claim it as theirs though. H’m. It is a dif­fi­cult case. What do you think I ought to do—re­sist? Eh? I want no more than jus­tice.’ … He wanted no more than jus­tice—no more than jus­tice. I rang the bell be­fore a ma­hogany door on the first floor, and while I waited he seemed to stare at me out of the glassy panel—stare with that wide and im­mense stare em­brac­ing, con­demn­ing, loathing all the uni­verse. I seemed to hear the whis­pered cry, “The hor­ror! The hor­ror!”

“The dusk was fall­ing. I had to wait in a lofty draw­ing-room with three long win­dows from floor to ceil­ing that were like three lu­mi­nous and bedraped col­umns. The bent gilt legs and backs of the fur­ni­ture shone in in­dis­tinct curves. The tall mar­ble fire­place had a cold and mon­u­men­tal white­ness. A grand pi­ano stood mas­sively in a cor­ner; with dark gleams on the flat sur­faces like a som­bre and pol­ished sar­coph­a­gus. A high door opened—closed. I rose.

“She came for­ward, all in black, with a pale head, float­ing to­wards me in the dusk. She was in mourn­ing. It was more than a year since his death, more than a year since the news came; she seemed as though she would re­mem­ber and mourn for­ever. She took both my hands in hers and mur­mured, ‘I had heard you were com­ing.’ I no­ticed she was not very young—I mean not girl­ish. She had a ma­ture ca­pac­ity for fi­delity, for be­lief, for suf­fer­ing. The room seemed to have grown darker, as if all the sad light of the cloudy evening had taken refuge on her fore­head. This fair hair, this pale vis­age, this pure brow, seemed sur­rounded by an ashy halo from which the dark eyes looked out at me. Their glance was guile­less, pro­found, con­fi­dent, and trust­ful. She car­ried her sor­row­ful head as though she were proud of that sor­row, as though she would say, ‘I—I alone know how to mourn for him as he de­serves.’ But while we were still shak­ing hands, such a look of aw­ful des­o­la­tion came upon her face that I per­ceived she was one of those crea­tures that are not the play­things of Time. For her he had died only yes­ter­day. And, by Jove! the im­pres­sion was so pow­er­ful that for me, too, he seemed to have died only yes­ter­day—nay, this very minute. I saw her and him in the same in­stant of time—his death and her sor­row—I saw her sor­row in the very mo­ment of his death. Do you un­der­stand? I saw them to­gether—I heard them to­gether. She had said, with a deep catch of the breath, ‘I have sur­vived’ while my strained ears seemed to hear dis­tinctly, min­gled with her tone of de­spair­ing re­gret, the sum­ming up whis­per of his eter­nal con­dem­na­tion. I asked my­self what I was do­ing there, with a sen­sa­tion of panic in my heart as though I had blun­dered into a place of cruel and ab­surd mys­ter­ies not fit for a hu­man be­ing to be­hold. She mo­tioned me to a chair. We sat down. I laid the packet gen­tly on the lit­tle ta­ble, and she put her hand over it. … ‘You knew him well,’ she mur­mured, af­ter a mo­ment of mourn­ing si­lence.

“ ‘In­ti­macy grows quickly out there,’ I said. ‘I knew him as well as it is pos­si­ble for one man to know an­other.’

“ ‘And you ad­mired him,’ she said. ‘It was im­pos­si­ble to know him and not to ad­mire him. Was it?’

“ ‘He was a re­mark­able man,’ I said, un­steadily. Then be­fore the ap­peal­ing fix­ity of her gaze, that seemed to watch for more words on my lips, I went on, ‘It was im­pos­si­ble not to—’

“ ‘Love him,’ she fin­ished ea­gerly, si­lenc­ing me into an ap­palled dumb­ness. ‘How true! how true! But when you think that no one knew him so well as I! I had all his no­ble con­fi­dence. I knew him best.’

“ ‘You knew him best,’ I re­peated. And per­haps she did. But with ev­ery word spo­ken the room was grow­ing darker, and only her fore­head, smooth and white, re­mained il­lu­mined by the in­ex­tin­guish­able light of be­lief and love.

“ ‘You were his friend,’ she went on. ‘His friend,’ she re­peated, a lit­tle louder. ‘You must have been, if he had given you this, and sent you to me. I feel I can speak to you—and oh! I must speak. I want you—you who have heard his last words—to know I have been wor­thy of him. … It is not pride. … Yes! I am proud to know I un­der­stood him bet­ter than any­one on earth—he told me so him­self. And since his mother died I have had no one—no one—to—to—’

“I lis­tened. The dark­ness deep­ened. I was not even sure whether he had given me the right bun­dle. I rather sus­pect he wanted me to take care of an­other batch of his pa­pers which, af­ter his death, I saw the man­ager ex­am­in­ing un­der the lamp. And the girl talked, eas­ing her pain in the cer­ti­tude of my sym­pa­thy; she talked as thirsty men drink. I had heard that her en­gage­ment with Kurtz had been dis­ap­proved by her peo­ple. He wasn’t rich enough or some­thing. And in­deed I don’t know whether he had not been a pau­per all his life. He had given me some rea­son to in­fer that it was his im­pa­tience of com­par­a­tive poverty that drove him out there.

“ ‘… Who was not his friend who had heard him speak once?’ she was say­ing. ‘He drew men to­wards him by what was best in them.’ She looked at me with in­ten­sity. ‘It is the gift of the great,’ she went on, and the sound of her low voice seemed to have the ac­com­pa­ni­ment of all the other sounds, full of mys­tery, des­o­la­tion, and sor­row, I had ever heard—the rip­ple of the river, the sough­ing of the trees swayed by the wind, the mur­murs of the crowds, the faint ring of in­com­pre­hen­si­ble words cried from afar, the whis­per of a voice speak­ing from be­yond the thresh­old of an eter­nal dark­ness. ‘But you have heard him! You know!’ she cried.

“ ‘Yes, I know,’ I said with some­thing like de­spair in my heart, but bow­ing my head be­fore the faith that was in her, be­fore that great and sav­ing il­lu­sion that shone with an un­earthly glow in the dark­ness, in the tri­umphant dark­ness from which I could not have de­fended her—from which I could not even de­fend my­self.

“ ‘What a loss to me—to us!’—she cor­rected her­self with beau­ti­ful gen­eros­ity; then added in a mur­mur, ‘To the world.’ By the last gleams of twi­light I could see the glit­ter of her eyes, full of tears—of tears that would not fall.

“ ‘I have been very happy—very for­tu­nate—very proud,’ she went on. ‘Too for­tu­nate. Too happy for a lit­tle while. And now I am un­happy for—for life.’

“She stood up; her fair hair seemed to catch all the re­main­ing light in a glim­mer of gold. I rose, too.

“ ‘And of all this,’ she went on mourn­fully, ‘of all his prom­ise, and of all his great­ness, of his gen­er­ous mind, of his no­ble heart, noth­ing re­mains—noth­ing but a mem­ory. You and I—’

“ ‘We shall al­ways re­mem­ber him,’ I said hastily.

“ ‘No!’ she cried. ‘It is im­pos­si­ble that all this should be lost—that such a life should be sac­ri­ficed to leave noth­ing—but sor­row. You know what vast plans he had. I knew of them, too—I could not per­haps un­der­stand—but oth­ers knew of them. Some­thing must re­main. His words, at least, have not died.’

“ ‘His words will re­main,’ I said.

“ ‘And his ex­am­ple,’ she whis­pered to her­self. ‘Men looked up to him—his good­ness shone in ev­ery act. His ex­am­ple—’

“ ‘True,’ I said; ‘his ex­am­ple, too. Yes, his ex­am­ple. I for­got that.’

“But I do not. I can­not—I can­not be­lieve—not yet. I can­not be­lieve that I shall never see him again, that no­body will see him again, never, never, never.’

“She put out her arms as if af­ter a re­treat­ing fig­ure, stretch­ing them back and with clasped pale hands across the fad­ing and nar­row sheen of the win­dow. Never see him! I saw him clearly enough then. I shall see this elo­quent phan­tom as long as I live, and I shall see her, too, a tragic and fa­mil­iar Shade, re­sem­bling in this ges­ture an­other one, tragic also, and be­decked with pow­er­less charms, stretch­ing bare brown arms over the glit­ter of the in­fer­nal stream, the stream of dark­ness. She said sud­denly very low, ‘He died as he lived.’

“ ‘His end,’ said I, with dull anger stir­ring in me, ‘was in ev­ery way wor­thy of his life.’

“ ‘And I was not with him,’ she mur­mured. My anger sub­sided be­fore a feel­ing of in­fi­nite pity.

“ ‘Every­thing that could be done—’ I mum­bled.

“ ‘Ah, but I be­lieved in him more than any­one on earth—more than his own mother, more than—him­self. He needed me! Me! I would have trea­sured ev­ery sigh, ev­ery word, ev­ery sign, ev­ery glance.’

“I felt like a chill grip on my chest. ‘Don’t,’ I said, in a muf­fled voice.

“ ‘For­give me. I—I have mourned so long in si­lence—in si­lence. … You were with him—to the last? I think of his lone­li­ness. No­body near to un­der­stand him as I would have un­der­stood. Per­haps no one to hear. …’

“ ‘To the very end,’ I said, shak­ily. ‘I heard his very last words. …’ I stopped in a fright.

“ ‘Re­peat them,’ she mur­mured in a heart­bro­ken tone. ‘I want—I want—some­thing—some­thing—to—to live with.’

“I was on the point of cry­ing at her, ‘Don’t you hear them?’ The dusk was re­peat­ing them in a per­sis­tent whis­per all around us, in a whis­per that seemed to swell men­ac­ingly like the first whis­per of a ris­ing wind. ‘The hor­ror! The hor­ror!’

“ ‘His last word—to live with,’ she in­sisted. ‘Don’t you un­der­stand I loved him—I loved him—I loved him!’

“I pulled my­self to­gether and spoke slowly.

“ ‘The last word he pro­nounced was—your name.’

“I heard a light sigh and then my heart stood still, stopped dead short by an ex­ult­ing and ter­ri­ble cry, by the cry of in­con­ceiv­able tri­umph and of un­speak­able pain. ‘I knew it—I was sure!’ … She knew. She was sure. I heard her weep­ing; she had hid­den her face in her hands. It seemed to me that the house would col­lapse be­fore I could es­cape, that the heav­ens would fall upon my head. But noth­ing hap­pened. The heav­ens do not fall for such a tri­fle. Would they have fallen, I won­der, if I had ren­dered Kurtz that jus­tice which was his due? Hadn’t he said he wanted only jus­tice? But I couldn’t. I could not tell her. It would have been too dark—too dark al­to­gether. …”

Mar­low ceased, and sat apart, in­dis­tinct and silent, in the pose of a med­i­tat­ing Bud­dha. No­body moved for a time. “We have lost the first of the ebb,” said the Direc­tor sud­denly. I raised my head. The off­ing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tran­quil wa­ter­way lead­ing to the ut­ter­most ends of the earth flowed som­bre un­der an over­cast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an im­mense dark­ness.