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<fo:block font-size="36pt" text-align="center">The Heart of Darkness</fo:block>
<fo:block font-size="24pt" text-align="center">Joseph Conrad</fo:block>









<fo:block font-size="24pt" text-align="center" space-before.optimum="24pt">I</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">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 spirits. 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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">Forthwith a change came over the waters, and the serenity
became less brilliant but more profound. The old river in its broad
reach rested unruffled at the decline of day, after ages of good
service done to the race that peopled its banks, spread out in the
tranquil dignity of a waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the
earth. We looked at the venerable stream not in the vivid flush of a
short day that comes and departs for ever, but in the august light of
abiding memories. And indeed nothing is easier for a man who has, as
the phrase goes, ``followed the sea'' with reverence and
affection, than to evoke the great spirit of the past upon the lower
reaches of the Thames. The tidal current runs to and fro in its
unceasing service, crowded with memories of men and ships it had borne
to the rest of home or to the battles of the sea. It had known and
served all the men of whom the nation is proud, from Sir Francis Drake
to Sir John Franklin, knights all, titled and untitled -- the
great knights-errant of the sea. It had borne all the ships whose
names are like jewels flashing in the night of time, from the Golden
Hind returning with her round flanks full of treasure, to be visited
by the Queen's Highness and thus pass out of the gigantic tale, to the
Erebus and Terror, bound on other conquests -- and that never
returned.  It had known the ships and the men. They had sailed from
Deptford, from Greenwich, from Erith -- the adventurers and the
settlers; kings' ships and the ships of men on `Change;
captains, admirals, the dark &quot;interlopers&quot; of the Eastern trade, and
the commissioned &quot;generals&quot; 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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">The sun set; the dusk fell on the stream, and lights began
to appear along the shore. The Chapman lighthouse, a three-legged
thing erect on a mud-flat, shone strongly. Lights of ships moved in
the fairway -- a great stir of lights going up and going
down. And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous
town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in
sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``And this also,'' said Marlow suddenly,
``has been one of the dark places of the
earth.''</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">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 --</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans
first came here, nineteen hundred years ago -- the other
day... Light came out of this river since -- you say
Knights?  Yes; but it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash
of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker -- may it last
as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here
yesterday. Imagine the feelings of a commander of a fine -- what
d'ye call 'em? -- trireme in the Mediterranean, ordered suddenly
to the north run overland across the Gauls in a hurry; put in charge
of one of these craft the legionaries -- a wonderful lot of handy
men they must have been, too -- used to build, apparently by the
hundred, in a month or two, if we may believe what we read. Imagine
him here -- the very end of the world, a sea the colour of lead,
a sky the colour of smoke, a kind of ship about as rigid as a
concertina -- and going up this river with stores, or orders, or
what you like. Sand-banks, marshes, forests, savages, -- precious
little to eat fit for a civilized man, nothing but Thames water to
drink. No Falernian wine here, no going ashore. Here and there a
military camp lost in a wilderness, like a needle in a bundle of hay
-- cold, fog, tempests, disease, exile, and death -- death
skulking in the air, in the water, in the bush. They must have been
dying like flies here. Oh, yes -- he did it. Did it very well,
too, no doubt, and without thinking much about it either, except
afterwards to brag of what he had gone through in his time,
perhaps. They were men enough to face the darkness. And perhaps he was
cheered by keeping his eye on a chance of promotion to the fleet at
Ravenna by and by, if he had good friends in Rome and survived the
awful climate. Or think of a decent young citizen in a toga --
perhaps too much dice, you know -- coming out here in the train
of some prefect, or tax-gatherer, or trader even, to mend his
fortunes. Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland
post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him
-- all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the
forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There's no
initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of
the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a
fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the
abomination -- you know, imagine the growing regrets, the longing
to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the
hate.''</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">He paused.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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...''</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">He broke off. Flames glided in the river, small green
flames, red flames, white flames, pursuing, overtaking, joining,
crossing each other -- then separating slowly or hastily. The
traffic of the great city went on in the deepening night upon the
sleepless river. We looked on, waiting patiently -- there was
nothing else to do till the end of the flood; but it was only after a
long silence, when he said, in a hesitating voice, ``I suppose
you fellows remember I did once turn fresh water sailor for a
bit,'' that we knew we were fated, before the ebb began to run,
to hear about one of Marlow's inconclusive experiences.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``I don't want to bother you much with what happened
to me personally,'' he began, showing in this remark the weakness
of many tellers of tales who seem so often unaware of what their
audience would best like to hear; ``yet to understand the effect
of it on me you ought to know how I got out there, what I saw, how I
went up that river to the place where I first met the poor chap. It
was the farthest point of navigation and the culminating point of my
experience. It seemed somehow to throw a kind of light on everything
about me -- and into my thoughts. It was 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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for
maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or
Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that
time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one
that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I
would put my finger on it and say, `When I grow up I will go
there.' The North Pole was one of these places, I
remember. Well, I haven't been there yet, and shall not try now. The
glamour's off. Other places were scattered about the Equator, and in
every sort of latitude all over the two hemispheres. I have been in
some of them, and ... well, we won't talk about that.  But there
was one yet -- the biggest, the most blank, so to speak --
that I had a hankering after.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``True, by this time it was not a blank space any
more. It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and
names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery --
a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a
place of darkness. But there was in it one river especially, a mighty
big river, that you could see on the map, resembling an immense snake
uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over
a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land. And as I
looked at the map of it in a shop-window, it fascinated me as a snake
would a bird -- a silly little bird. Then I remembered there was
a big concern, a Company for trade on that river. Dash it all! I
thought to myself, they can't trade without using some kind of craft
on that lot of fresh water -- steamboats! Why shouldn't I try to
get charge of one? I went on along Fleet Street, but could not shake
off the idea. The snake had charmed me.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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! We]l, 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., etc. She was
determined to make no end of fuss to get me appointed skipper of a
river steamboat, if such was my fancy.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``I flew around like mad to get ready, and before
forty-eight hours I was crossing the Channel to snow myself to my
employers, and sign the contract. In a very few hours I arrived in a
city that always makes me think of a whited sepulchre. Prejudice no
doubt. I had no difficulty in finding the Company's offices. It was
the biggest thing in the town, and everybody I met was full of
it. They were going to run an over sea empire, and make no end of coin
by trade.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``A narrow and deserted street in deep shadow, high
houses, innumerable windows with venetian blinds, a dead silence,
grass sprouting between the stones, imposing carriage archways right
and left, immense double doors standing ponderously ajar. I slipped
through one of these cracks, went up a swept and ungarnished
staircase, as arid as a desert, and opened the first door I came to.
Two women, one fat and the other slim, sat on straw-bottomed chairs,
knitting black wool. The slim one got up and walked straight at me
-- still knitting with downcast eyes -- and only just as I
began to think of getting out of her way, as you would for a
somnambulist, stood still, and looked up. Her dress was as plain as an
umbrella-cover, and she turned round without a word and preceded me
into a waiting-room. I gave my name, and looked about. Deal table in
the middle, plain chairs all round the walls, on one end a large
shining map, marked with all the 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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``There was yet a visit to the doctor. `A simple
formality,' assured me the secretary, with an air of taking an
immense part in all my sorrows. Accordingly a young chap wearing his
hat over the left eyebrow, some clerk I suppose -- there must
have been clerks in the business, though the house was as still as a
house in a city of the dead -- came from somewhere up-stairs, and
led me forth. He was shabby and careless, with inkstains on the
sleeves of his jacket, and his cravat was large and billowy, under a
chin shaped like the toe of an old boot. It was a little too early for
the doctor, so I proposed a drink, and thereupon he developed a vein
of joviality. As we sat over our vermouths he glorified the Company's
business, and by and by I expressed casually my surprise at him not
going out there. He became very cool and collected all at
once. `I am not such a fool as I look, quoth Plato to his
disciples,' he said sententiously, emptied his glass with great
resolution, and we rose.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``The old doctor felt my pulse, evidently thinking of
something else the while. `Good, good for there,' he
mumbled, and then with a certain eagerness asked me whether I would
let him measure my head. Rather surprised, I said Yes, when he
produced a thing like calipers and got the dimensions back and front
and every way, taking notes carefully. He was an unshaven little man
in a threadbare coat like a gaberdine, with his feet in slippers, and
I thought him a harmless fool. `I always ask leave, in the
interests of science, to measure the crania of those going out
there,' he said.  `And when they come back, too?' I
asked. `Oh, I never see them,' he remarked; `and,
moreover, the changes take place inside, you know.' He smiled,
as if at some quiet joke. `So you are going out there. Famous.
Interesting, too.' He gave me a searching glance, and made
another note. `Ever any madness in your family?' he asked,
in a matter-of-fact tone. I felt very annoyed. `Is that question
in the interests of science, too?' `It would be,' he
said, without taking notice of my irritation, `interesting for
science to watch the mental changes of individuals, on the spot, but
...' `Are you an alienist?' I
interrupted. `Every doctor should be -- a little,'
answered that original, imperturbably.  `I have a little theory
which you messieurs who go out there must help me to prove. This is my
share in the advantages my country shall reap from the possession of
such a magnificent dependency. The mere wealth I leave to
others. Pardon my questions, but you are the first Englishman coming
under my observation...' I hastened to assure him I was not
in the least typical. `If I were,' said I, `I
wouldn't be talking like this with you.' `What you say is
rather profound, and probably erroneous,' he said, with a
laugh. `Avoid irritation more than exposure to the
sun. Adieu. How do you English say, eh? Good-bye.  Ah!
Good-bye. Adieu. In the tropics one must before everything keep
calm.' ... He lifted a warning forefinger... ``Du
calme, du calme, Adieu.''</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``One thing more remained to do -- say good-bye
to my excellent aunt. I found her triumphant. I had a cup of tea
-- the last decent cup of tea for many days -- and in a room
that most soothingly looked just as you would expect a lady's
drawing-room to look, we had a long quiet chat by the fireside. In the
course of these confidences it became quite plain to me I had been
represented to the wife of the high dignitary, and goodness knows to
how many more people besides, as an exceptional and gifted creature
-- a piece of good fortune for the Company -- a man you
don't get hold of every day. Good heavens! and I was going to take
charge of a two-penny-half-penny river-steamboat with a penny whistle
attached! It appeared, however, I was also one of the Workers, with a
capital -- you know. Something like an emissary of light,
something like a lower sort of apostle. There had been a lot of such
rot let loose in print and talk just about that time, and the
excellent woman, living right in the rush of all that humbug, got
carried off her feet. She talked about `weaning those ignorant
millions from their horrid ways,' till, upon my word, she made
me quite uncomfortable. I ventured to hint that the Company was run
for profit.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">`` `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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``After this I got embraced, told to wear flannel, be
sure to write often, and so on -- and I left. In the street
-- I don't know why -- a queer feeling came to me that I was
an impostor. Odd thing that I, who used to clear out for any part of
the world at twenty-four hours' notice, with less thought than most
men give to the crossing of a street, had a moment -- I won't say
of hesitation, but of startled pause, before this commonplace
affair. The best way I can explain it to you is by saying that, for a
second or two, I felt as though, instead of going to the centre of a
continent, I were about to set off for the centre of the
earth.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``I left in a French steamer, and she called in every
blamed port they have out there, for, as far as I could see, the sole
purpose of landing soldiers and custom-house officers. I watched the
coast. Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about
an enigma. There it is before you -- smiling, frowning, inviting,
grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of
whispering, `Come and find out.' This one was almost
featureless, as if still in the making, with an aspect of monotonous
grimness. The edge of a colossal jungle, so dark-green as to be almost
black, fringed with white surf, ran straight, like a ruled line, far,
far away along a blue sea whose glitter was blurred by a creeping
mist. The sun was fierce, the land seemed to glisten and drip with
steam. Here and there greyish-whitish specks showed up clustered
inside the white surf, with a flag flying above them
perhaps. Settlements some centuries old, and still no bigger than
pinheads on the untouched expanse of their background. We pounded
along, stopped, landed soldiers; went on, landed custom-house clerks
to levy toll in what looked like a God-forsaken wilderness, with a tin
shed and a flag-pole lost in it; landed more soldiers to take care of
the custom-house clerks, presumably. Some, I heard, got drowned in the
surf; but whether they did or not, nobody seemed particularly to
care. They were just flung out there, and on we went. Every day the
coast looked the same, as though we had not moved; but we passed
various places -- trading places with names like Gran' Bassam,
Little Popo; names that seemed to belong to some sordid farce acted in
front of a sinister back-cloth.  The idleness of a passenger, my
isolation amongst all these men with whom I had no point of contact,
the oily and languid sea, the uniform sombreness of the coast, seemed
to keep me away from the truth of things, within the toil of a
mournful and senseless delusion.  The voice of the surf heard now and
then was a positive pleasure, like the speech of a brother. It was
something natural, that had its reason, that had a meaning Now and
then a boat from the shore gave one a momentary contact with
reality. It was paddled by black fellows. You could see from afar the
white of their eyeballs glistening. They shouted, sang; their bodies
streamed with perspiration; they had faces like grotesque masks
-- these chaps; but they had bone, muscle, a wild vitality, an
intense energy of movement, that was as natural and true as the surf
along their coast. They wanted no excuse for being there.  They were a
great comfort to look at. For a time I would feel I belonged still to
a world of straightforward facts; but the feeling would not last
long. Something would turn up to scare it away. Once, I remember, we
came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn't even a
shed there, and she was shelling the bush. It appears the French had
one of their wars going on thereabouts. Her ensign dropped limp like a
rag; the muzzles of the long six-inch guns stuck out all over the low
hull; the greasy, slimy swell swung her up lazily and let her down,
swaying her thin masts. In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and
water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop,
would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and
vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would
give a feeble screech -- and nothing happened. Nothing could
happen.  There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of
lugubrious drollery in the sight; and it was not dissipated by
somebody on board assuring me earnestly there was a camp of natives
-- he called them enemies! -- hidden out of sight somewhere.
** &quot;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</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``I had my passage on a little sea-going steamer.  Her
captain was a Swede, and knowing me for a seaman, invited me on the
bridge. He was a young man, lean, fair, and morose, with lanky hair
and a shuffling gait. As we left the miserable little wharf, he tossed
his head contemptuously at the shore. `Been living there?'
he asked. I said, `Yes.' `Fine lot these government
chaps -- are they not?' he went on, speaking English with
great precision and considerable bitterness.  `It is funny what
some people will do for a few francs a month. I wonder what becomes of
that kind when it goes upcountry?' I said to him I expected to
see that soon. `So-o-o!' he exclaimed. He shuffled
athwart, keeping one eye ahead vigilantly. `Don't be too
sure,' he continued. `The other day I took up a man who
hanged himself on the road. He was a Swede, too.' `Hanged
himself! Why, in God's name?' I cried. He kept on looking out
watchfully. `Who knows? The sun too much for him, or the country
perhaps.'</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.'</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``I avoided a vast artificial hole somebody had been
digging on the slope, the purpose of which I found it impossible to
divine. It wasn't a quarry or a sandpit, anyhow. It was just a
hole. It might have been connected with the philanthropic desire of
giving the criminals something to do. I don't know. Then I nearly fell
into a very narrow ravine, almost no more than a scar in the
hillside. I discovered that a lot of imported drainage-pipes for the
settlement had been tumbled in there. There wasn't one that was not
broken. It was a wanton smash-up. At last I got under the trees. My
purpose was to stroll into the shade for a moment; but no sooner
within than it seemed to me I had stepped into the gloomy circle of
some Inferno.  The rapids were near, and an uninterrupted, uniform,
headlong, rushing noise filled the mournful stillness of the grove,
where not a breath stirred, not a leaf moved, with a mysterious sound
-- as though the tearing pace of the launched earth had suddenly
become audible.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees
leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out,
half effased 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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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 -- 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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``I shook hands with this miracle, and I learned he
was the Company's chief accountant, and that all the bookkeeping was
done at this station. He had come out for a moment, he said, `to
get a breath of fresh air.' The expression sounded wonderfully
odd, with its suggestion of sedentary desk-life. I wouldn't have
mentioned the fellow to you at all, only it was from his lips that I
first heard the name of the man who is so indissolubly connected with
the memories of that time. Moreover, I respected the fellow. Yes; I
respected his collars, his vast cuffs, his brushed hair. His
appearance was certainly that of a hairdresser's dummy; but in the
great demoralization of the land he kept up his appearance. That's
backbone. His starched collars and got-up shirt-fronts were
achievements of character. He had been out nearly three years; and
later, 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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``Everything else in the station was in a muddle
-- heads, things, buildings. Strings of dusty niggers with splay
feet arrived and departed; a stream of manufactured goods, rubbishy
cottons, beads, and brass-wire set into the depths of darkness, and in
return came a precious trickle of ivory.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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 up-country) was put in there, he
exhibited a gentle annoyance.  `The groans of this sick
person,' he said, `distract my attention. And without that
it is extremely difficult to guard against clerical errors in this
climate.'</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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. `Oho, 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.'</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``He turned to his work. The noise outside had ceased,
and presently in going out I stopped at the door. In the steady buzz
of flies the homeward-bound agent was lying flushed and insensible;
the other, bent over his books, was making correct entries of
perfectly correct transactions; and fifty feet below the doorstep I
could see the still treetops of the grove of death.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``Next day I left that station at last, with a caravan
of sixty men, for a two-hundred-mile tramp.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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!'</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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 feature, 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 mess-room. Where he sat was the first
place -- the rest were nowhere. One felt this to be his
unalterable conviction. He was neither civil nor uncivil. He was
quiet. He allowed his `boy' -- an over-fed young
negro from the coast -- to treat the white men, under his very
eyes, with provoking insolence.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``He began to speak as soon as he saw me. I had been
very long on the road. He could not wait. Had to start without me. The
up-river stations had to be relieved. There had been so many delays
already that he did not know who was dead and who was alive, and how
they got on -- and so on, and so on. He paid no attention to my
explanation, 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. &quot;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.'</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``I strolled up. There was no hurry. You see the thing
had gone off like a box of matches. It had been hopeless from the very
first. The flame had leaped high, driven everybody back, lighted up
everything -- and collapsed. The shed was already a heap of
embers glowing fiercely. A nigger was being beaten near by.  They said
he had caused the fire in some way; be that as it may, he was
screeching most horribly. I saw him, later, for several days, sitting
in a bit of shade looking very sick and trying to recover himself:
afterwards he arose and went out -- and the wilderness without a
sound took him into its bosom again. As I approached the glow from the
dark I found myself at the back of two men, talking. I heard the name
of Kurtz pronounced, then the words, `take advantage of this
unfortunate accident.' One of the men was the manager. I wished
him a good evening. `Did you ever see anything like it --
eh? it is incredible,' he said, and walked off.  The other man
remained. He was a first-class agent, young, gentlemanly, a bit
reserved, with a forked little beard and a hooked nose. He was
stand-offish with the other agents, and they on their side said he was
the manager's spy upon them. As to me, I had hardly ever spoken to him
before. We got into talk, and by and by we strolled away from the
hissing ruins.  Then he asked me to his room, which was in the main
building of the station. He struck a match, and I perceived that this
young aristocrat had not only a silver-mounted dressing-case but also
a whole candle all to himself. Just at that time the manager was the
only man supposed to have any right to candles.  Native mats covered
the clay walls; a collection of spears, assegais, shields, knives was
hung up in trophies.  The business intrusted to this fellow was the
making of bricks -- so I had been informed; but there wasn't a
fragment of a brick anywhere in the station, and he 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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``I had no idea why he wanted to be sociable, but as
we chatted in there it suddenly ocurred 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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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?'</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">`` `The chief of the Inner Station,' he
answered in a short tone, looking away. `Much obliged,' I
said, laughing. `And you are the brickmaker of the Central
Station. Every one knows that.' He was silent for a
while. `He is a prodigy,' he said at last. `He is an
emissary of pity and science and progress, and devil knows what
else. We want,' he began to declaim suddenly, `for the
guidance of the cause intrusted to us by Europe, so to speak, higher
intelligence, wide sympathies, a singleness of purpose.'
`Who says that?' I asked. `Lots of them,' he
replied. `Some even write that; and so he comes here, a special
being, as you ought to know.' `Why ought I to know?'
I interrupted, really surprised. He paid no attention. `Yes.
Today he is chief of the best station, next year he will be
assistant-manager, two years more and ... but I 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.'</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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 the dim stir,
through the faint sounds of that lamentable courtyard, the silence of
the land went home to one's very heart -- its mystery, its
greatness, the amazing reality of its concealed life. The hurt nigger
moaned feebly somewhere near by, and then fetched a deep sigh that
made me mend my pace away from there. I felt a hand introducing itself
under my arm. `My dear sir,' said the fellow, `I
don't want to be misunderstood, and especially by you, who will see
Mr. Kurtz long before I can have that pleasure. I wouldn't like him to
get a false idea of my disposition...'</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``I let him run on, this papier-mache Mephistopheles,
and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through
him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe. He,
don't you see, had been planning to be assistant-manager by and by
under the present man, and I could see that the coming of that Kurtz
had upset them both not a little. He talked precipitately, and I did
not try to stop him. I had my shoulders against the wreck of my
steamer, hauled up on the slope like a carcass of some big river
animal. The smell of mud, of primeval mud, by Jove!  was in my
nostrils, the high stillness of primeval forest was before my eyes;
there were shiny patches on the black creek. The moon had spread over
everything a thin layer of silver -- over the rank grass, over
the mud, upon the wall of matted vegetation standing higher than the
wall of a temple, over the great river I could see through a sombre
gap glittering, glittering, as it flowed broadly by without a
murmur. All this was great, expectant, mute, while the man jabbered
about himself. I wondered whether the stillness on the face of the
immensity looking at us two were meant as an appeal or as a
menace. What were we who had strayed in here? Could we handle that
dumb thing, or would it handle us? I felt how big, how confoundedly
big, was that thing that couldn't talk, and perhaps was deaf as
well. What was in there? I could see a little ivory coming out from
there, and I had heard Mr. Kurtz was in there. I had heard enough
about it, too -- God knows! Yet somehow it didn't bring any image
with it -- no more than if I had been told an angel or a fiend
was in there. I believed it in the same way one of you might believe
there are inhabitants in the planet Mars. I knew once a Scotch
sailmaker who was certain, dead sure, there were people in Mars. If
you asked him for some idea how they looked and behaved, he would get
shy and mutter something about `walking on all-fours.' If
you as much as smiled, he would -- though a man of sixty --
offer to fight you. I would not have gone so far as to fight for
Kurtz, but I went for him near enough to 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...''</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">He was silent for a while.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``... 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...''</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">He paused again again if reflecting, then
added:</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``Of course in this you fellows see more than I could
then. You see me, whom you know...''</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``... Yes -- I let him run on,&quot; Marlow began
again, &quot;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 to, but nothing to fasten them
with. And every week the messenger, a lone negro, letterbag 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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``He was becoming confidential now, but I fancy my
unresponsive attitude must have exasperated him at last, for he judged
it necessary to inform me he feared neither God nor devil, let alone
any mere man. I said I could see that very well, but what I wanted was
a certain quantity of rivets -- and rivets were what really
Mr. Kurtz wanted, if he had only known it. Now letters went to the
coast every week... `My dear sir,' he cried, `I
write from dictation.' I demanded rivets. There was a way
-- for an intelligent man. He changed his manner; became very
cold, and suddenly began to talk about a hippopotamus; wondered
whether sleeping on board the steamer (I stuck to my salvage night and
day) I wasn't disturbed. There was an old hippo that had the bad habit
of getting out on the bank and roaming at night over the station
grounds. The pilgrims used to turn out in a body and empty every rifle
they could lay hands on at him.  Some even had sat up o' nights for
him. All this energy was wasted, though. `That animal has a
charmed life,' he said; `but you can say this only of
brutes in this country. No man -- you apprehend me?  -- no
man here bears a charmed life.' He stood there for a moment in
the moonlight with his delicate hooked nose set a little askew, and
his mica eyes glittering without a wink, then, with a curt Good-night,
he strode off. I could see he was disturbed and considerably puzzled,
which made me feel more hopeful than I had been for days. It was a
great comfort to turn from that chap to my influential friend, the
battered, twisted, ruined, tin-pot steamboat. I clambered on
board. She rang under my feet like an empty Huntley &amp; 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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``I was not surprised to see somebody sitting aft, on
the deck, with his legs dangling over the mud. You see I rather
chummed with the few mechanics there were in that station, whom the
other pilgrims naturally despised -- on account of their
imperfect manners, I suppose. This was the foreman -- a
boiler-maker by trade -- a good worker. He was a lank, bony,
yellow-faced man, with big intense eyes. His aspect was worried, and
his head was as bald as the palm of my hand; but his hair in falling
seemed to have stuck to his chin, and had prospered in the new
locality, for his beard hung down to his waist. He was a widower with
six young children (he had left them in charge of a sister of his to
come out there), and the passion of his life was pigeon-flying. He was
an enthusiast and a connoisseur. He would rave about pigeons. After
work hours he used sometimes to come over from his hut for a talk
about his children and his pigeons; at work, when he had to crawl in
the mud under the bottom of the steamboat, he would tie up that beard
of his in a kind of white serviette he brought for the purpose. It had
loops to go over his ears. In the evening he could be seen squatted on
the bank rinsing that wrapper in the creek with great care, then
spreading it solemnly on a bush to dry.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``I slapped him on the back and shouted, `We
shall have rivets!' He scrambled to his feet exclaiming,
`No! Rivets!' as though he couldn't believe his ears.
Then in a low voice, `You ... eh?' I don't know why
we behaved like lunatics. I put my finger to the side of my nose and
nodded mysteriously. `Good for you!' he cried, snapped his
fingers above his head, lifting one foot. I tried a jig. We capered on
the iron deck. A frightful clatter came out of that hulk, and the
virgin forest on the other bank of the creek sent it back in a
thundering roll upon the sleeping station.  It must have made some of
the pilgrims sit up in their hovels. A dark figure obscured the
lighted doorway of the manager's hut, vanished, then, a second or so
after, the doorway itself vanished, too. We stopped, and the silence
driven away by the stamping of our feet flowed back again from the
recesses of the land.  The great wall of vegetation, an exuberant and
entangled mass of trunks, branches, leaves, boughs, festoons,
motionless in the moonlight, was like a rioting invasion of soundless
life, a rolling wave of plants, piled up, crested, ready to topple
over the creek, to sweep every little man of us out of his little
existence.  And it moved not. A deadened burst of mighty splashes and
snorts reached us from afar, as though an ichthyosaurus had been
taking a bath of glitter in the great river. `After all,'
said the boiler-maker in a reasonable tone, `why shouldn't we
get the rivets?' Why not, indeed! I did not know of any reason
why we shouldn't. `They'll come in three weeks,' I said,
confidently.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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
court-yard, 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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.''</fo:block>






 
<fo:block font-size="24pt" text-align="center" space-before.optimum="24pt">II</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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!' `H'm. Just so,' grunted the
uncle. `Ah! my boy, trust to this -- I say, trust to
this.' I saw him extend his short flipper of an arm for a
gesture that took in the forest, the creek, the mud, the river --
seemed to beckon with a 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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``In a few days the Eldorado Expedition went into the
patient wilderness, that dosed 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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``Going up that river was like travelling 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 over-shadowed
distances. On silvery sandbanks hippos and alligators sunned
themselves side by side. The broadening waters flowed through a mob of
wooded islands; you lost your way on that river as you would in a
desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to find the
channel, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off for ever from
everything you had known once -- somewhere -- far away
-- in another existence perhaps. There were moments when one's
past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment
to spare to yourself; but it came in the shape of an unrestful and
noisy dream, remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities
of this strange world of plants, and water, and silence.  And this
stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the
stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable
intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect. I got used to it
afterwards; I did not see it any more; I had no time. I had to keep
guessing at the channel; I had to discern, mostly by inspiration, the
signs of hidden banks; I watched for sunken stones; I was learning to
clap my teeth smartly before my heart flew out, when I shaved by a
fluke some infernal sly old snag that would have ripped the life out
of the tin-pot steamboat and drowned all the pilgrims; I had to keep a
lookout for the signs of dead wood we could cut up in the night for
next day's steaming. When you have to attend to things of that sort,
to the mere incidents of the surface, the reality -- the reality,
I tell you -- fades. The inner truth is hidden -- luckily,
luckily. But I felt it all the same; I felt often its mysterious
stillness watching me at my monkey tricks, just as it watches you
fellows performing on your respective tight-ropes for -- what is
it?  half-a-crown a tumble --''</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``Try to be civil, Marlow,'' growled a voice, and
I knew there was at least one listener awake besides
myself.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``I beg your pardon. I forgot the heartache which
makes up the rest of the price. And indeed what does the price matter,
if the trick be well done? You do your tricks very well. And I didn't
do badly either, since I managed not to sink that steamboat on my
first trip. It's a wonder to me yet. Imagine a blindfolded man set to
drive a van over a bad road. I sweated and shivered over that business
considerably, I can tell you. After all, for a seaman, to scrape the
bottom of the thing that's supposed to float all the time under his
care is the unpardonable sin. No one may know of it, but you never
forget the thump -- eh? A blow on the very heart. You remember
it, you dream of it, you wake up at night and think of it --
years after -- and go hot and cold all over. I don't pretend to
say that steamboat floated all the time. More than once she had to
wade for a bit, with twenty cannibals splashing around and pushing. We
had enlisted some of these chaps on the way for a crew. Fine fellows
-- cannibals -- in their place. They were men one could work
with, and I am grateful to them. And, after all, they did not eat each
other before my face: they had brought along a provision of hippo-meat
which went rotten, and made the mystery of the wilderness stink in my
nostrils. Phoo! I can sniff it now. I had the manager on board and
three or four pilgrims with their staves -- all
complete. Sometimes we came upon a station close by the bank, clinging
to the skirts of the unknown, and the white men rushing out of a
tumble-down hovel, with great gestures of joy and surprise and
welcome, seemed very strange -- had the appearance of being held
there captive by a spell. The word ivory would ring in the air for a
while -- and on we went again into the silence, along empty
reaches, round the still bends, between the high walls of our winding
way, reverberating in hollow claps the ponderous beat of the
stern-wheel. Trees, trees, millions of trees, massive, immense,
running up high; and at their foot, hugging the bank against the
stream, crept the little begrimed steamboat, like a sluggish beetle
crawling on the floor of a lofty portico. It made you feel very small,
very lost, and yet it was not altogether depressing, that
feeling. After all, if you were small, the grimy beetle crawled on
-- which was just what you wanted it to do. Where the pilgrims
imagined it crawled to I don't know. To some place where they expected
to get something. I bet! For me it crawled towards Kurtz --
exclusively; but when the steam-pipes started leaking we crawled very
slow.  The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the
forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our
return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness. It
was very quiet there. At night sometimes the roll of drums behind the
curtain of trees would run up the river and remain sustained faintly,
as if hovering in the air high over our heads, till the first break of
day. Whether it meant war, peace, or prayer we could not tell. The
dawns were heralded by the descent of a chill stillness; the
wood-cutters slept, their fires burned low; the snapping of a twig
would make you start. 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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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 steampipes -- I tell you. I had to watch the
steering, and circumvent those snags, and get the tin-pot along by
hook or by crook. There was surface-truth enough in these things to
save a wiser man. And between whiles I had to look after the savage
who was fireman. He was an improved specimen; he could fire up a
vertical boiler. He was there below me, and, upon my word, to look at
him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a
feather hat, walking on his hindlegs. A few months of training had
done for that really fine chap. He squinted at the steam-gauge and at
the water-guage 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 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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``The current was more rapid now, the steamer seemed
at her last gasp, the stern-wheel flopped languidly, and I caught
myself listening on tiptoe for the next beat of the boat, for in sober
truth I expected the wretched thing to give up every moment. It was
like watching the last flickers of a life. But still we crawled.
Sometimes I would pick out a tree a little way ahead to measure our
progress towards Kurtz by, but I lost it invariably before we got
abreast. To keep the eyes so long on one thing was too much for human
patience.  The manager displayed a beautiful resignation. I fretted
and fumed and took to arguing with myself whether or no I would talk
openly with Kurtz; but before I could come to any conclusion it
occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of
mine, would be a mere futility. What did it matter what any one knew
or ignored? What did it matter who was manager? One gets sometimes
such a flash of insight. The essentials of this affair lay deep under
the surface, beyond my reach, and beyond my power of
meddling.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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 whole
minute, then dashed into the little cabin, to rush out incontinently
and stand darting scared glances, with Winchesters at
`ready' in their hands. What we could see was just the
steamer we were on, her outlines blurred as though she had been on the
point of dissolving, and a misty strip of water, perhaps two feet
broad, around her -- and that was all. The rest of the world was
nowhere, as far as our eyes and ears were concerned. Just nowhere.
Gone, disappeared; swept off without leaving a whisper or a shadow
behind.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``I went forward, and ordered the chain to be hauled
in short, so as to be ready to trip the anchor and move the steamboat
at once if necessary. `Will they attack?' whispered an
awed voice. `We will be all butchered in this fog,'
murmured another. The faces twitched with the strain, the hands
trembled slightly, the eyes forgot to wink. It was very curious to see
the contrast of expressions of the white men and of the black fellows
of our crew, who were as much strangers to that part of the river as
we, though their homes were only eight hundred miles away.  The
whites, of course greatly discomposed, had besides a curious look of
being painfully shocked by such an outrageous row. The others had an
alert, naturally interested expression; but their faces were
essentially quiet, even those of the one or two who grinned as they
hauled at the chain. Several exchanged short, grunting phrases, which
seemed to settle the matter to their satisfaction. Their headman, a
young, broad-chested black, severely draped in dark-blue fringed
cloths, with fierce nostrils and his hair all done up artfully in oily
ringlets, stood near me. `Aha!' I said, just for good
fellowship's sake. `Catch 'im,' he snapped, with a
bloodshot widening of his eyes and a flash of sharp teeth --
`catch 'im. Give 'im to us. `To you, eh?' I asked;
`what would you do with them?' `Eat 'im!' he
said curtly, and, leaning his elbow on the rail, looked out into the
fog in a dignified and profoundly pensive attitude. I would no doubt
have been properly horrified, had it not occurred to me that he and
his chaps must be very hungry: that they must have been growing
increasingly hungry for at least this month past. They had been
engaged for six months (I don't think a single one of them had any
clear idea of time, as we at the end of countless ages have. They
still belonged to the beginnings of time -- had no inherited
experience to teach them as it were), and of course, as long as there
was a piece of paper written over in accordance with some farcical law
or other made down the river, it didn't enter anybody's head to
trouble how they would live. Certainly they had brought with them some
rotten hippo-meat, which couldn't have lasted very long, anyway, even
if the pilgrims hadn't, in the midst of a shocking hullabaloo, thrown
a considerable quantity of it overboard. It looked like a high-handed
proceeding; but it was really a case of legitimate self-defence. You
can't breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same
time keep your precarious grip on existence.  Besides that, they had
given them every week three pieces of brass wire, each about nine
inches long; and the theory was they were to buy their provisions with
that currency in riverside villages. You can see how that
worked. There were either no villages, or the people were hostile, or
the director, who like the rest of us fed out of tins, with an
occasional old he-goat thrown in, didn't want to stop the steamer for
some more or less recondite reason. So, unless they swallowed the wire
itself, or made loops of it to snare the fishes with, I don't see what
good their extravagant salary could be to them. I must say it was paid
with a regularity worthy of a large and honourable trading
company. For the rest, the only thing to eat -- though it didn't
look eatable in the least -- I saw in their possession was a few
lumps of some stuff like half-cooked dough, of a dirty lavender
colour, they kept wrapped in leaves, and now and then swallowed a
piece of, but so small that it seemed done more for the looks of the
thing than for any serious purpose of sustenance.  Why in the name of
all the gnawing devils of hunger they didn't go for us -- they
were thirty to five -- and have a good tuck-in for once, amazes
me now when I think of it. They were big powerful men, with not much
capacity to weigh the consequences, with courage, with strength, even
yet, though their skins were no longer glossy and their muscles no
longer hard.  And I saw that something restraining, one of those human
secrets that baffle probability, had come into play there. I looked at
them with a swift quickening of interest -- not because it
occurred to me I might be eaten by them before very long, though I own
to you that just then I perceived -- in a new light, as it were
-- how unwholesome the pilgrims looked, and I hoped, yes, I
positively hoped, that my aspect was not so -- what shall I say?
-- so -- unappetizing: a touch of fantastic vanity which
fitted well with the dream-sensation that pervaded all my days at that
time. Perhaps I had a little fever, too. One can't live with one's
finger everlastingly on one's pulse. I had often `a little
fever,' or a little touch of other things -- the playful
paw-strokes of the wilderness, the preliminary trifling before the
more serious onslaught which came in due course. Yes; I looked at them
as you would on any human being, with a curiosity of their impulses,
motives, capacities, weaknesses, when brought to the test of an
inexorable physical necessity. Restraint!  What possible restraint?
Was it superstition, disgust, patience, fear -- or some kind of
primitive honour? No fear can stand up to hunger, no patience can wear
it out, disgust simply does not exist where hunger is; and as to
superstition, beliefs, and what you may call principles, they are less
than chaff in a breeze. Don't you know the devilry of lingering
starvation, its exasperating torment, its black thoughts, its sombre
and brooding ferocity? Well, I do. It takes a man all his inborn
strength to fight hunger properly. It's really easier to face
bereavement, dishonour, and the perdition of one's soul -- than
this kind of prolonged hunger. Sad, but true. And these chaps, too,
had no earthly reason for any kind of scruple. Restraint! I would just
as soon have expected restraint from a hyena prowling amongst the
corpses of a battlefield. But there was the fact facing me -- the
fact dazzling, to be seen, like the foam on the depths of the sea,
like a ripple on an unfathomable enigma, a mystery greater --
when I thought of it -- than the curious, inexplicable note of
desperate grief in this savage clamour that had swept by us on the
river-bank, behind the blind whiteness of the fog.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``Two pilgrims were quarrelling in hurried whispers as
to which bank. `Left.' `No, no; how can you?  Right,
right, of course.' `It is very serious,' said the
manager's voice behind me; `I would be desolated if anything
should happen to Mr. Kurtz before we came up.' I looked at him,
and had not the slightest doubt he was sincere. He was just the kind
of man who would wish to preserve appearances. That was his restraint.
But when he muttered something about going on at once, I did not even
take the trouble to answer him. I knew, and he knew, that it was
impossible.  Were we to let go our hold of the bottom, we would be
absolutely in the air -- in space. We wouldn't be able to tell
where we were going to -- whether up or down stream, or across
-- till we fetched against one bank or the other -- and then
we wouldn't know at first which it was. Of course I made no move. I
had no mind for a smash-up. You couldn't imagine a more deadly place
for a shipwreck. Whether 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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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...</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``It developed itself, I should say, two hours after
the fog lifted, and its commencement was at a spot, roughly speaking,
about a mile and a half below Kurtz's station. We had just floundered
and flopped round a bend, when I saw an islet, a mere grassy hummock
of bright green, in the middle of the stream.  It was the only thing
of the kind; but as we opened the reach more, I perceived it was the
head of a long sand-bank, or rather of a chain of shallow patches
stretching down the middle of the river. They were discoloured, just
awash, and the whole lot was seen just under the water, exactly as a
man's backbone is seen running down the middle of his back under the
skin. Now, as far as I did see, I could go to the right or to the left
of this. I didn't know either channel, of course. The banks looked
pretty well alike, the depth appeared the same; but as I had been
informed the station was on the west side, I naturally headed for the
western passage.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``One of my hungry and forbearing friends was sounding
in the bows just below me. This steamboat was exactly like a decked
scow. On the deck, there were two little teakwood houses, with doors
and windows.  The boiler was in the fore-end, and the machinery right
astern. Over the whole there was a light roof, supported on
stanchions. The funnel projected through that roof, and in front of
the funnel a small cabin built of light planks served for a
pilot-house. It contained a couch, two camp-stools, a loaded
Martini-Henry leaning in one corner, a tiny table, and the
steering-wheel. It had a wide door in front and a broad shutter at
each side. All these were always thrown open, of course. I spent my
days perched up there on the extreme fore-end of that roof, before the
door. At night I slept, or tried to, on the couch. An athletic black
belonging to some coast tribe and educated by my poor predecessor, was
the helmsman. He sported a pair of brass earrings, wore a blue cloth
wrapper from the waist to the ankles, and thought all the world of
himself. He was the most unstable kind of fool I had ever seen. He
steered with no end of a swagger while you were by; but if he lost
sight of you, he became instantly the prey of an abject funk, and
would let that cripple of a steamboat get the upper hand of him in a
minute.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``I was looking down at the sounding-pole, and feeling
much annoyed to see at each try a little more of it stick out of that
river, when I saw my poleman give up the business suddenly, and
stretch himself flat on the deck, without even taking the trouble to
haul his pole in. He kept hold on it though, and it trailed in the
water. At the same time the fireman, whom I could also see below me,
sat down abruptly before his furnace and ducked his head. I was
amazed. Then I had to look at the river mighty quick, because there
was a snag in the fairway. Sticks, little sticks, were flying about
-- thick: they were whizzing before my nose, dropping below me,
striking behind me against my pilot-house. All this time the river,
the shore, the woods, were very quiet -- perfectly quiet. I could
only hear the heavy splashing thump of the stern-wheel and the patter
of these things. We cleared the snag clumsily. Arrows, by Jove! We
were being shot at!  I stepped in quickly to close the shutter on the
land-side.  That fool-helmsman, his hands on the spokes, was lifting
his knees high, stamping his feet, champing his mouth, like a
reined-in horse. Confound him! And we were staggering within ten feet
of the bank. I had to lean right out to swing the heavy shutter, and I
saw a face amongst the leaves on the level with my own, looking at me
very fierce and steady; and then suddenly, as though a veil had been
removed from my eyes, I made out, deep in the tangled gloom, naked
breasts, arms, legs, glaring eyes -- the bush was swarming with
human limbs in movement, glistening, of bronze colour. The twigs
shook, swayed, and rustled, the arrows flew out of them, and then the
shutter came to. `Steer her straight,' I said to the
helmsman. He held his head rigid, face forward; but his eyes rolled,
he kept on lifting and setting down his feet gently, his mouth foamed
a little. `Keep quiet!' I said in a fury. I might just as
well have ordered a tree not to sway in the wind. I darted out.  Below
me there was a great scuffle of feet on the iron deck; confused
exclamations; a voice screamed, `Can you turn back?' I
caught sight of a V-shaped ripple on the water ahead. What? Another
snag! A fusillade burst out under my feet. The pilgrims had opened
with their Winchesters, and were simply squirting lead into that
bush. A deuce of a lot of smoke came up and drove slowly forward. I
swore at it. Now I couldn't see the ripple or the snag either. I stood
in the doorway, peering, and the arrows came in swarms.  They might
have been poisoned, but they looked as though they wouldn't kill a
cat. The bush began to howl. Our wood-cutters raised a warlike whoop;
the report of a rifle just at my back deafened me. I glanced over my
shoulder, and the pilot-house was yet full of noise and smoke when I
made a dash at the wheel.  The fool-nigger had dropped everything, to
throw the shutter open and let off that Martini-Henry. He stood before
the wide opening, glaring, and I yelled at him to come back, while I
straightened the sudden twist out of that steamboat. There was no room
to turn even if I had wanted to, the snag was somewhere very near
ahead in that confounded smoke, there was no time to lose, so I just
crowded her into the bank -- right into the bank, where I knew
the water was deep.</fo:block>


<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``We tore slowly along the overhanging bushes in a
whirl of broken twigs and flying leaves. The fusillade below stopped
short, as I had foreseen it would when the squirts got empty. I threw
my head back to a glinting whizz that traversed the pilot-house, in at
one shutter-hole and out at the other. Looking past that mad helmsman,
who was shaking the empty rifle and yelling at the shore, I saw vague
forms of men running bent double, leaping, gliding, distinct,
incomplete, evanescent. Something big appeared in the air before the
shutter, the rifle went overboard, and the man stepped back swiftly,
looked at me over his shoulder in an extraordinary, profound, familiar
manner, and fell upon my feet. The side of his head hit the wheel
twice, and the end of what appeared a long cane clattered round and
knocked over a little 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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``We two whites stood over him, and his lustrous and
inquiring glance enveloped us both. I declare it looked as though he
would presently put to us some question in an understandable language;
but he died without uttering a sound, without moving a limb, without
twitching a muscle. Only in the very last moment, as though in
response to some sign we could not see, to some whisper we could not
hear, he frowned heavily, and that frown gave to his black death-mask
an inconceivably sombre, brooding, and menacing expression. The lustre
of inquiring glance faded swiftly into vacant glassiness. `Can
you steer?' I asked the agent eagerly. He looked very dubious;
but I made a grab at his arm, and he understood at once I meant him to
steer whether or no. To tell you the truth, I was morbidly anxious to
change my shoes and socks. `He is dead,' murmured the
fellow, immensely impressed. `No doubt about it,' said I,
tugging like mad at the shoe laces. `And by the way, I suppose
Mr.  Kurtz is dead as well by this time.'</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.''...</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">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 abtention;
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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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 --''</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">He was silent for a long time.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``I laid the ghost of his gifts at last with a
lie,'' he began, suddenly. ``Girl! What? Did I mention a
girl?  Oh, she is out of it -- completely. They -- the women
I mean -- are out of it -- should be out of it. We must help
them to stay in that beautiful world of their own, lest ours gets
worse. Oh, she had to be out of it. You should have heard the
disinterred body of Mr. Kurtz saying, `My Intended.' You
would have perceived directly then how completely she was out of
it. And the lofty frontal bone of Mr. Kurtz! They say the hair goes on
growing sometimes, but this -- ah -- specimen, was
impressively bald. The wilderness had patted him on the head, and,
behold, it was like a ball -- an ivory ball; it had caressed him,
and -- lo! -- he had withered; it had taken him, loved him,
embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed his
soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish
initiation. He was its spoiled and pampered favourite. Ivory? I should
think so. Heaps of it, stacks of it. The old mud shanty was bursting
with it. You would think there was not a single tusk left either above
or below the ground in the whole country. `Mostly fossil,'
the manager had remarked, disparagingly. It was no more fossil than I
am; but they call it fossil when it is dug up. It appears these
niggers do bury the tusks sometimes -- but evidently they
couldn't bury this parcel deep enough to save the gifted Mr. Kurtz
from his fate. We filled the steamboat with it, and had to pile a lot
on the deck. Thus he could see and enjoy as long as he could see,
because the appreciation of this favour had remained with him to the
last. You should have heard him say, `My ivory.' Oh, yes,
I heard him. `My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my
--' everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath
in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into a prodigious peal
of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their
places. Everything belonged to him -- but that was a trifle. The
thing was to know what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness
claimed him for their own. That was the reflection that made you
creepy all over. It was impossible -- it was not good for one
either -- trying to imagine. He had taken a high seat amongst the
devils of the land -- I mean literally. You can't understand. How
could you? -- with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by
kind neighbours ready to cheer you or to fall on you, stepping
delicately between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror
of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums -- how can you imagine
what particular region of the first ages a man's untrammelled feet may
take him into by the way of solitude -- utter solitude without a
policeman -- by the way of silence -- utter silence, where
no warning voice of a kind neighbour can be heard whispering of public
opinion? These little things make all the great difference. When they
are gone you must fall back upon your own innate strength, upon your
own capacity for faithfulness. Of course you may be too much of a fool
to go wrong -- too dull even to know you are being assaulted by
the powers of darkness. I take it, no fool ever made a bargain for his
soul with the devil; the fool is too much of a fool, or the devil too
much of a devil -- I don't know which. Or you may be such a
thunderingly exalted creature as to be altogether deaf and blind to
anything but heavenly sights and sounds. Then the earth for you is
only a standing place -- and whether to be like this is your loss
or your gain I won't pretend to say. But most of us are neither one
nor the other. The earth for us is a place to live in, where we must
put up with sights, with sounds, with smells, too, by Jove! --
breathe dead hippo, so to speak, and not be contaminated. And there,
don't you see? Your strength comes in, the faith in your ability for
the digging of unostentatious holes to bury the stuff in -- your
power of devotion, not to yourself, but to an obscure back-breaking
business.  And that's difficult enough. Mind, I am not trying to
excuse or even explain -- I am trying to account to myself for
-- for -- Mr. Kurtz -- for the shade of Mr. Kurtz. This
initiated wraith from the back of Nowhere honoured me with its amazing
confidence before it vanished altogether. This was because it could
speak English to me. The original Kurtz had been educated partly in
England, and -- as he was good enough to say himself -- his
sympathies were in the right place. His mother was half-English, his
father was half-French. All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz;
and by and by I learned that, most appropriately, the International
Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs had intrusted him with
the making of a report, for its future guidance.  And he had written
it, too. I've seen it. I've read it. It was eloquent, vibrating with
eloquence, but too high-strung, I think. Seventeen pages of close
writing he had found time for! But this must have been before his
-- let us say -- nerves, went wrong, and caused him to
preside at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites,
which -- as far as I reluctantly gathered from what I heard at
various times -- were offered up to him -- do you
understand?  -- to Mr. Kurtz himself. But it was a beautiful
piece of writing. The opening paragraph, however, in the light of
later information, strikes me now as ominous. He began with the
argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived
at, `must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of
supernatural beings -- we approach them with the might as of a
deity,' and so on, and so on. `By the simple exercise of
our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,'
etc., etc. From that point he soared and took me with him. The
peroration was magnificent, though difficult to remember, you know. It
gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august
Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm. This was the unbounded
power of eloquence -- of words -- of burning noble
words. There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of
phrases, unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled
evidently much later, in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as the
exposition of a method.  It was very simple, and at the end of that
moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous
and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky:
`Exterminate all the brutes!' The curious part was that he
had apparently forgotten all about that valuable postscriptum,
because, later on, when he in a sense came to himself, he repeatedly
entreated me to take good care of `my pamphlet' (he called
it), as it was sure to have in the future a good influence upon his
career. I had full information about all these things, and, besides,
as it turned out, I was to have the care of his memory. I've done
enough for it to give me the indisputable right to lay it, if I
choose, for an everlasting rest in the dust-bin of progress, amongst
all the sweepings and, figuratively speaking, all the dead cats of
civilization. But then, you see, I can't choose. He won't be
forgotten. Whatever he was, he was not common. He had the power to
charm or frighten rudimentary souls into an aggravated witch-dance in
his honour; he could also fill the small souls of the pilgrims with
bitter misgivings: he had one devoted friend at least, and he had
conquered one soul in the world that was neither rudimentary nor
tainted with self-seeking. No; I can't forget him, though I am not
prepared to affirm the fellow was exactly worth the life we lost in
getting to him. I missed my late helmsman awfully -- I missed him
even while his body was still lying in the pilot-house.  Perhaps you
will think it passing strange this regret for a savage who was no more
account than a grain of sand in a black Sahara. Well, don't you see,
he had done something, he had steered; for months I had him at my back
-- a help -- an instrument. It was a kind of partnership. He
steered for me -- I had to look after him, I worried about his
deficiencies, and thus a subtle bond had been created, of which I only
became aware when it was suddenly broken. And the intimate profundity
of that look he gave me when he received his hurt remains to this day
in my memory -- like a claim of distant kinship affirmed in a
supreme moment.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``Poor fool! If he had only left that shutter alone.
He had no restraint, no restraint just like Kurtz -- a tree
swayed by the wind. As soon as I had put on a dry pair of slippers, I
dragged him out, after first jerking the spear out of his side, which
operation I confess I performed with my eyes shut tight. His heels
leaped together over the little doorstep; his shoulders were pressed
to my breast; I hugged him from behind desperately.  Oh! he was heavy,
heavy; heavier than any man on earth, I should imagine. Then without
more ado I tipped him overboard. The current snatched him as though he
had been a wisp of grass, and I saw the body roll over twice before I
lost sight of it for ever. All the pilgrims and the manager were then
congregated on the awning-deck about the pilot-house, chattering at
each other like a flock of excited magpies, and there was a
scandalized murmur at my heartless promptitude. What they wanted to
keep that body hanging about for I can't guess. Embalm it, maybe.  But
I had also heard another, and a very ominous, murmur on the deck
below. My friends the wood-cutters were likewise scandalized, and with
a better show of reason -- though I admit that the reason itself
was quite inadmissible. Oh, quite! I had made up my mind that if my
late helmsman was to be eaten, the fishes alone should have him. He
had been a very second-rate helmsman while alive, but now he was dead
he might have become a first-class temptation, and possibly cause some
startling trouble. Besides, I was anxious to take the wheel, the man
in pink pyjamas showing himself a hopeless duffer at the
business.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``Through my glasses I saw the slope of a hill
interspersed with rare trees and perfectly free from undergrowth.  A
long decaying building on the summit was half buried in the high
grass; the large holes in the peaked roof gaped black from afar; the
jungle and the woods made a background. There was no enclosure or
fence of any kind; but there had been one apparently, for near the
house half-a-dozen slim posts remained in a row, roughly trimmed, and
with their upper ends ornamented with round carved balls. The rails,
or whatever there had been between, had disappeared.  Of course the
forest surrounded all that.  The river-bank was clear, and on the
waterside I saw a white man under a hat like a 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.'</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``His aspect reminded me of something I had seen
-- something funny I had seen somewhere. As I manoeuvred to get
alongside, I was asking myself, `What does this fellow look
like?' Suddenly I got it.  He looked like a harlequin. His
clothes had been made of some stuff that was brown holland probably,
but it was covered with patches all over, with bright patches, blue,
red, and yellow -- patches on the back, patches on the front,
patches on elbows, on knees; coloured binding around his jacket,
scarlet edging at the bottom of his trousers; and the sunshine made
him look extremely gay and wonderfully neat withal, because you could
see how beautifully all this patching had been done. A beardless,
boyish face, very fair, no features to speak of, nose peeling, little
blue eyes, smiles and frowns chasing each other over that open
countenance like sunshine and shadow on a wind-swept
plain. `Look out, captain!' he cried; `there's a
snag lodged in here last night.' What! Another snag?  I confess
I swore shamefully. I had nearly holed my cripple, to finish off that
charming trip. The harlequin on the bank turned his little pug-nose up
to me. `You English?' he asked, all smiles. `Are
you?' I shouted from the wheel. The smiles vanished, and he
shook his head as if sorry for my disappointment. Then he brightened
up. `Never mind!' he cried encouragingly.  `Are we
in time?' I asked. `He is up there,' he replied,
with a toss of the head up the hill, and becoming gloomy all of a
sudden. His face was like the autumn sky, overcast one moment and
bright the next.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``When the manager, escorted by the pilgrims, all of
them armed to the teeth, had gone to the house this chap came on
board. `I say, I don't like this.  These natives are in the
bush,' I said. He assured me earnestly it was all
right. `They are simple people,' he added; `well, I
am glad you came. It took me all my time to keep them off.'
`But you said it was all right,' I cried. `Oh, they
meant no harm,' he said; and as I stared he corrected himself,
`Not exactly.' Then vivaciously, `My faith, your
pilot-house wants a clean-up!' In the next breath he advised me
to keep enough steam on the boiler to blow the whistle in case of any
trouble. `One good screech will do more for you than all your
rifles. They are simple people,' he repeated. He rattled away at
such a rate he quite overwhelmed me. He seemed to be trying to make up
for lots of silence, and actually hinted, laughing, that such was the
case. `Don't you talk with Mr. Kurtz?' I said. `You
don't talk with that man -- you listen to him,' he
exclaimed with severe exaltation. `But now --' He
waved his arm, and in the twinkling of an eye was in the uttermost
depths of despondency. In a moment he came up again with a jump,
possessed himself of both my hands, shook them continuously, while he
gabbled: `Brother sailor ... honour ... pleasure
... delight ...introduce myself ... Russian ...
son of an arch-priest ... Government of Tambov ... What?
Tobacco! English tobacco; the excellent English tobacco! Now, that's
brotherly. Smoke?  Where's a sailor that does not
smoke?'</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``The pipe soothed him, and gradually I made out he
had run away from school, had gone to sea in a Russian ship; ran away
again; served some time in English ships; was now reconciled with the
arch-priest.  He made a point of that. `But when one is young
one must see things, gather experience, ideas; enlarge the
mind.' `Here!' I interrupted. `You can never
tell! Here I met Mr. Kurtz,' he said, youth fully 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?'</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.''</fo:block>






 <fo:block font-size="24pt" text-align="center" space-before.optimum="24pt">III</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``I looked at him, lost in astonishment. There he was
before me, in motley, as though he had absconded from a troupe of
mimes, enthusiastic, fabulous. His very existence was improbable,
inexplicable, and altogether bewildering. He was an insoluble
problem. It was inconceivable how he had existed, how he had succeeded
in getting so far, how he had managed to remain -- why he did not
instantly disappear. `I went a little farther,' he said,
`then still a little farther -- till I had gone so far that
I don't know how I'll ever get back. Never mind. Plenty time. I can
manage.  You take Kurtz away quick -- quick -- I tell
you.' The glamour of youth enveloped his parti-coloured rags,
his destitution, his loneliness, the essential desolation of his
futile wanderings. For months -- for years -- his life
hadn't been worth a day's purchase; and there he was gallantly,
thoughtlessly alive, to all appearance indestructible solely by the
virtue of his few years and of his unreflecting audacity. I was
seduced into something like admiration -- like envy. Glamour
urged him on, glamour kept him unscathed. He surely wanted nothing
from the wilderness but space to breathe in and to push on
through. His need was to exist, and to move onwards at the greatest
possible risk, and with a maximum of privation. If the absolutely
pure, uncalculating, unpractical spirit of adventure had ever ruled a
human being, it ruled this 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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.'</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``He threw his arms up. We were on deck at the time,
and the headman of my wood cutters, lounging near by, turned upon him
his heavy and glittering eyes. I looked around, and I don't know why,
but I assure you that never, never before, did this land, this river,
this jungle, the very arch of this blazing sky, appear to me so
hopeless and so dark, so impenetrable to human thought, so pitiless to
human weakness.  `And, ever since, you have been with him, of
course?' I said.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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 dosed
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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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
his 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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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 the 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 a]l,
that was only a savage sight, while I seemed at one bound to have been
transported into some lightless region of subtle horrors, where pure,
uncomplicated savagery was a positive relief, being something that had
a right to exist -- obviously -- in the sunshine. The young
man looked at me with surprise.  I suppose it did not occur to him
that Mr. Kurtz was no idol of mine. He forgot I hadn't heard any of
these splendid monologues on, what was it? on love, justice, conduct
of life -- or what not. If it had come to crawling before
Mr. Kurtz, he crawled as much as the veriest savage of them all. I had
no idea of the conditions, he said: these heads were the heads of
rebels. I shocked him excessively by laughing. Rebels! What would be
the next definition I was to hear? There had been enemies, criminals,
workers -- and these were rebels. Those rebellious heads looked
very subdued to me on their sticks. `You don't know how such a
life tries a man like Kurtz,' cried Kurtz's last disciple.
`Well, and you?' I said. `I! I! I am a simple man. I
have no great thoughts. I want nothing from anybody.  How can you
compare me to ... ?' His feelings were too much for speech,
and suddenly he broke down. `I don't understand,' he
groaned. `I've been doing my best to keep him alive, and that's
enough.  I had no hand in all this. I have no abilities. There hasn't
been a drop of medicine or a mouthful of invalid food for months
here. He was shamefully abandoned.  A man like this, with such
ideas. Shamefully!  Shamefully! I -- I -- haven't slept for
the last ten nights ...'</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">`` `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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``Some of the pilgrims behind the stretcher carried
his arms -- two shot-guns, a heavy rifle, and a light
revolver-carbine -- the thunderbolts of that pitiful Jupiter. The
manager bent over him murmuring as he walked beside his head. They
laid him down in one of the little cabins -- just a room for a
bed place and a camp-stool or two, you know. We had brought his
belated correspondence, and a lot of torn envelopes and open letters
littered his bed. His hand roamed feebly amongst these papers. I was
struck by the fire of his eyes and the composed languor of his
expression.  It was not so much the exhaustion of disease. He did not
seem in pain. This shadow looked satiated and calm, as though for the
moment it had had its fill of all the emotions.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``Dark human shapes could be made out in the distance,
flitting indistinctly against the gloomy border of the forest, and
near the river two bronze figures, leaning on tall spears, stood in
the sunlight under fantastic head-dresses of spotted skins, warlike
and still in statuesque repose. And from right to left along the
lighted shore moved a wild and gorgeous apparition of a
woman.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``She walked with measured steps, draped in striped
and fringed clothes, 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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">`` `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.'</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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...'</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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 cold 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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.'</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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 didn'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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``He informed me, lowering his voice, that it was
Kurtz who had ordered the attack to be made on the steamer. `He
hated sometimes the idea of being taken away -- and then
again... But I don't understand these matters. I am a simple man. He
thought it would scare you away -- that you would give it up,
thinking him dead. I could not stop him. Oh, I had an awful time of it
this last month.' `Very well,' I said.  `He is
all right now.' `Ye-e-es,' he muttered, not very
convinced apparently. `Thanks,' said I; `I shall
keep my eyes open.' `But quiet -- eh?' he urged
anxiously.  `It would be awful for his reputation if anybody
here --' I promised a complete discretion with great
gravity. `I have a canoe and three black fellows waiting not
very far. I am off. Could you give me a few Martini-Henry
cartridges?' I could, and did, with proper secrecy. He helped
himself, with a wink at me, to a handful of my tobacco. `Between
sailors -- you know -- good English tobacco.' At the
door of the pilot-house he turned round -- `I say, haven't
you a pair of shoes you could spare?' He raised one leg.
`Look' The soles were tied with knotted strings sandalwise
under his bare feet. I rooted out an old pair, at which he looked with
admiration before tucking it under his left arm. One of his pockets
(bright red) was bulging with cartridges, from the other (dark blue)
peeped `Towson's Inquiry,' etc., etc. He seemed to think
himself excellently well equipped for a renewed encounter with the
wilderness. `Ah! I'll never, never meet such a man again. You
ought to have heard him recite poetry -- his own, too, it was, he
told me. Poetry!' He rolled his eyes at the recollection of
these delights. `Oh, he enlarged my mind!'
`Good-bye,' said I. He shook hands and vanished in the
night. Sometimes I ask myself whether I had ever really seen him
-- whether it was possible to meet such a phenomenon!  ...
</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``There was an agent buttoned up inside an ulster and
sleeping on a chair on deck within three feet of me. The yells had not
awakened him; he snored very slightly; I left him to his slumbers and
leaped ashore.  I did not betray Mr. Kurtz -- it was ordered I
should never betray him -- it was written I should be loyal to
the nightmare of my choice. I was anxious to deal with this shadow by
myself alone -- and to this day I don't know why I was so jealous
of sharing with any one the peculiar blackness of that
experience.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">`` `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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``When next day we left at noon, the crowd, of whose
presence behind the curtain of trees I had been acutely conscious all
the time, flowed out of the woods again, filled the clearing, covered
the slope with a mass of naked, breathing, quivering, bronze bodies. I
steamed up a bit, then swung down stream, and two thousand eyes
followed the evolutions of the splashing, thumping, fierce river-demon
beating the water with its terrible tail and breathing black smoke
into the air. In front of the first rank, along the river, three men,
plastered with bright red earth from head to foot, strutted to and fro
restlessly. When we came abreast again, they faced the river, stamped
their feet, nodded their horned heads, swayed their scarlet bodies;
they shook towards the fierce river-demon a bunch of black feathers, a
mangy skin with a pendent tail -- something that looked like a
dried gourd; they shouted periodically together strings of amazing
words that resembled no sounds of human language; and the deep murmurs
of the crowd, interrupted suddenly, were like the responses of some
satanic litany.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``We had carried Kurtz into the pilot-house: there was
more air there. Lying on the couch, he stared through the open
shutter. There was an eddy in the mass of human bodies, and the woman
with helmeted head and tawny cheeks rushed out to the very brink of
the stream. She put out her hands, shouted something, and all that
wild mob took up the shout in a roaring chorus of articulated, rapid,
breathless utterance.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">`` `Do you understand this?' I
asked.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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, appearing
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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``I pulled the string of the whistle, and I did this
because I saw the pilgrims on deck getting out their rifles with an
air of anticipating a jolly lark. At the sudden screech there was a
movement of abject terror through that wedged mass of
bodies. `Don't! don't you frighten them away,' cried some
one on deck disconsolately.  I pulled the string time after time. They
broke and ran, they leaped, they crouched, they swerved, they dodged
the flying terror of the sound.  The three red chaps had fallen flat,
face down on the shore, as though they had been shot dead. Only the
barbarous and superb woman did not so much as flinch, and stretched
tragically her bare arms after us over the sombre and glittering
river.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``And then that imbecile crowd down on the deck
started their little fun, and I could see nothing more for
smoke.</fo:block>






 
<fo:block font-size="24pt" text-align="center" space-before.optimum="24pt">[[uncertain]]</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``We broke down -- as I had expected -- and
had to lie up for repairs at the head of an island. This delay was the
first thing that shook Kurtz's confidence. One morning he gave me a
packet of papers and a photograph -- the lot tied together with a
shoe-string. `Keep this for me,' he said. `This
noxious fool' (meaning the manager) `is capable of prying
into my boxes when I am not looking.' In the afternoon I saw
him. He was lying on his back with closed eyes, and I withdrew
quietly, but I heard him mutter, `Live rightly, die, die
...' I listened. There was nothing more. Was he rehearsing
some speech in his sleep, or was it a fragment of a phrase from some
newspaper article? He had been writing for the papers and meant to do
so again, `for the furthering of my ideas. It's a
duty.'</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``His was an impenetrable darkness. I looked at him as
you peer down at a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where
the sun never shines. But I had not much time to give him, because I
was helping the engine-driver to take to pieces the leaky cylinders,
to straighten a bent connecting-rod, and in other such matters. I
lived in an infernal mess of rust, filings, nuts, bolts, spanners,
hammers, ratchet drills -- things I abominate, because I don't
get on with them. I tended the little forge we fortunately had aboard;
I toiled wearily in a wretched scrap-heap -- unless I had the
shakes too bad to stand.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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:</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">`` `The horror! The horror!'</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``I blew the candle out and left the cabin. The
pilgrims were dining in the mess-room, and I took my place opposite
the manager, who lifted his eyes to give me a questioning glance,
which I successfully ignored.  He leaned back, serene, with that
peculiar smile of his sealing the unexpressed depths of his
meanness. A continuous shower of small flies streamed upon the lamp,
upon the cloth, upon our hands and faces. Suddenly the manager's boy
put his insolent black head in the doorway, and said in a tone of
scathing contempt:</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">`` `Mistah Kurtz -- he
dead.'</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``All the pilgrims rushed out to see. I remained, and
went on with my dinner. I believe that 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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``And then they very nearly buried me.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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!  '</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``The dusk was falling. I had to wait in a lofty
drawingroom 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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">`` `Intimacy grows quickly out there,' I
said. `I knew him as well as it is possible for one man to know
another.'</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">`` `And you admired him,' she
said. `It was impossible to know him and not to admire him. Was
it?'</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">`` `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 --'</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">`` `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.'</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">`` `You knew him best,' I repeated. And
perhaps she did. But with every word spoken the room was growing
darker, and only her forehead, smooth and white, remained illumined by
the unextinguishable light of belief and love.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">`` `You were his friend,' she went
on. `His friend,' she repeated, a little
louder. `You must have been, if he had given you this, and sent
you to me. I feel I can speak to you -- and oh! I must speak. I
want you -- you who have heard his last words -- to know I
have been worthy of him... It is not pride... Yes!  I am
proud to know I understood him better than any one on earth -- he
told me so himself. And since his mother died I have had no one
-- no one -- to -- to --'</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">`` `... 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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">`` `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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">`` `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.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">`` `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.'</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``She stood up; her fair hair seemed to catch all the
remaining light in a glimmer of gold. I rose, too.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">`` `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 --'</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">`` `We shall always remember him,' I said
hastily.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">`` `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.'</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">`` `His words will remain,' I
said.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">`` `And his example,' she whispered to
herself. `Men looked up to him -- his goodness shone in
every act.  His example --'</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">`` `True,' I said; `his example,
too. Yes, his example.  I forgot that.'</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">`` `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.'</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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.'</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">`` `His end,' said I, with dull anger
stirring in me, 'was in every way worthy of his
life.'</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">`` `And I was not with him,' she
murmured. My anger subsided before a feeling of infinite
pity.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">`` `Everything that could be done --'
I mumbled.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">`` `Ah, but I believed in him more than any one
on earth -- more than his own mother, more than -- himself.
He needed me! Me! I would have treasured every sigh, every word, every
sign, every glance.'</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``I felt like a chill grip on my
chest. `Don't,' I said, in a muffled voice.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">`` `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...'</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">`` `To the very end,' I said,
shakily. `I heard his very last words...' I stopped
in a fright.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">`` `Repeat them,' she murmured in a
heart-broken tone. `I want -- I want -- something
-- something -- to -- to live with.'</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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!'</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">`` `His last word -- to live with,'
she insisted. `Don't you understand I loved him -- I loved
him -- I loved him!'</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``I pulled myself together and spoke
slowly.</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``'The last word he pronounced was -- your
name.'</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">``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...
''</fo:block>

<fo:block font-size="12pt" space-before.optimum="12pt" text-align="justify">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.</fo:block>






</fo:flow></fo:page-sequence></fo:root>
