its hint of danger that seemed, in the starred darkness, real enough to
make me get up for the purpose of having a look round. On the hill a
big fire burned, illuminating fitfully a crooked corner of the
station-house. One of the agents with a picket of a few of our blacks,
armed for the purpose, was keeping guard over the ivory; but deep
within the forest, red gleams that wavered, that seemed to sink and
rise from the ground amongst confused columnar shapes of intense
blackness, showed the exact position of the camp where Mr. Kurtz’s
adorers were keeping their uneasy vigil. The monotonous beating of a
big drum filled the air with muffled shocks and a lingering vibration.
A steady droning sound of many men chanting each to himself some weird
incantation came out from the black, flat wall of the woods as the
humming of bees comes out of a hive, and had a strange narcotic effect
upon my half-awake senses. I believe I dozed off leaning over the rail,
till an abrupt burst of yells, an overwhelming outbreak of a pent-up
and mysterious frenzy, woke me up in a bewildered wonder. It was cut
short all at once, and the low droning went on with an effect of
audible and soothing silence. I glanced casually into the little cabin.
A light was burning within, but Mr. Kurtz was not there.
“I think I would have raised an outcry if I had believed my eyes. But I
didn’t believe them at first—the thing seemed so impossible. The fact
is I was completely unnerved by a sheer blank fright, pure abstract
terror, unconnected with any distinct shape of physical danger. What
made this emotion so overpowering was—how shall I define it?—the moral
shock I received, as if something altogether monstrous, intolerable to
thought and odious to the soul, had been thrust upon me unexpectedly.
This lasted of course the merest fraction of a second, and then the
usual sense of commonplace, deadly danger, the possibility of a sudden
onslaught and massacre, or something of the kind, which I saw
impending, was positively welcome and composing. It pacified me, in
fact, so much that I did not raise an alarm.
“There was an agent buttoned up inside an ulster and sleeping on a
chair on deck within three feet of me. The yells had not awakened him;
he snored very slightly; I left him to his slumbers and leaped ashore.
I did not betray Mr. Kurtz—it was ordered I should never betray him—it
was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice. I was
anxious to deal with this shadow by myself alone—and to this day I
don’t know why I was so jealous of sharing with any one the peculiar
blackness of that experience.
“As soon as I got on the bank I saw a trail—a broad trail through the
grass. I remember the exultation with which I said to myself, ‘He can’t
walk—he is crawling on all-fours—I’ve got him.’ The grass was wet with
dew. I strode rapidly with clenched fists. I fancy I had some vague
notion of falling upon him and giving him a drubbing. I don’t know. I
had some imbecile thoughts. The knitting old woman with the cat
obtruded herself upon my memory as a most improper person to be sitting
at the other end of such an affair. I saw a row of pilgrims squirting
lead in the air out of Winchesters held to the hip. I thought I would
never get back to the steamer, and imagined myself living alone and
unarmed in the woods to an advanced age. Such silly things—you know.
And I remember I confounded the beat of the drum with the beating of my
heart, and was pleased at its calm regularity.
“I kept to the track though—then stopped to listen. The night was very
clear; a dark blue space, sparkling with dew and starlight, in which
black things stood very still. I thought I could see a kind of motion
ahead of me. I was strangely cocksure of everything that night. I
actually left the track and ran in a wide semicircle (I verily believe
chuckling to myself) so as to get in front of that stir, of that motion
I had seen—if indeed I had seen anything. I was circumventing Kurtz as
though it had been a boyish game.
“I came upon him, and, if he had not heard me coming, I would have
fallen over him, too, but he got up in time. He rose, unsteady, long,
pale, indistinct, like a vapour exhaled by the earth, and swayed
slightly, misty and silent before me; while at my back the fires loomed
between the trees, and the murmur of many voices issued from the
forest. I had cut him off cleverly; but when actually confronting him I
seemed to come to my senses, I saw the danger in its right proportion.
It was by no means over yet. Suppose he began to shout? Though he could
hardly stand, there was still plenty of vigour in his voice. ‘Go
away—hide yourself,’ he said, in that profound tone. It was very awful.
I glanced back. We were within thirty yards from the nearest fire. A
black figure stood up, strode on long black legs, waving long black
arms, across the glow. It had horns—antelope horns, I think—on its
head. Some sorcerer, some witch-man, no doubt: it looked fiendlike
enough. ‘Do you know what you are doing?’ I whispered. ‘Perfectly,’ he
answered, raising his voice for that single word: it sounded to me far
off and yet loud, like a hail through a speaking-trumpet. ‘If he makes
a row we are lost,’ I thought to myself. This clearly was not a case
for fisticuffs, even apart from the very natural aversion I had to beat
that Shadow—this wandering and tormented thing. ‘You will be lost,’ I
said—‘utterly lost.’ One gets sometimes such a flash of inspiration,
you know. I did say the right thing, though indeed he could not have
been more irretrievably lost than he was at this very moment, when the
foundations of our intimacy were being laid—to endure—to endure—even to
the end—even beyond.
“‘I had immense plans,’ he muttered irresolutely. ‘Yes,’ said I; ‘but
if you try to shout I’ll smash your head with—’ There was not a stick
or a stone near. ‘I will throttle you for good,’ I corrected myself. ‘I
was on the threshold of great things,’ he pleaded, in a voice of
longing, with a wistfulness of tone that made my blood run cold. ‘And
now for this stupid scoundrel—’ ‘Your success in Europe is assured in
any case,’ I affirmed steadily. I did not want to have the throttling
of him, you understand—and indeed it would have been very little use
for any practical purpose. I tried to break the spell—the heavy, mute
spell of the wilderness—that seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast
by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of
gratified and monstrous passions. This alone, I was convinced, had
driven him out to the edge of the forest, to the bush, towards the
gleam of fires, the throb of drums, the drone of weird incantations;
this alone had beguiled his unlawful soul beyond the bounds of
permitted aspirations. And, don’t you see, the terror of the position
was not in being knocked on the head—though I had a very lively sense
of that danger, too—but in this, that I had to deal with a being to
whom I could not appeal in the name of anything high or low. I had,
even like the niggers, to invoke him—himself—his own exalted and
incredible degradation. There was nothing either above or below him,
and I knew it. He had kicked himself loose of the earth. Confound the
man! he had kicked the very earth to pieces. He was alone, and I before
him did not know whether I stood on the ground or floated in the air.
I’ve been telling you what we said—repeating the phrases we
pronounced—but what’s the good? They were common everyday words—the
familiar, vague sounds exchanged on every waking day of life. But what
of that? They had behind them, to my mind, the terrific suggestiveness
of words heard in dreams, of phrases spoken in nightmares. Soul! If
anybody ever struggled with a soul, I am the man. And I wasn’t arguing
with a lunatic either. Believe me or not, his intelligence was
perfectly clear—concentrated, it is true, upon himself with horrible
intensity, yet clear; and therein was my only chance—barring, of
course, the killing him there and then, which wasn’t so good, on
account of unavoidable noise. But his soul was mad. Being alone in the
wilderness, it had looked within itself, and, by heavens! I tell you,
it had gone mad. I had—for my sins, I suppose—to go through the ordeal
of looking into it myself. No eloquence could have been so withering to
one’s belief in mankind as his final burst of sincerity. He struggled
with himself, too. I saw it—I heard it. I saw the inconceivable mystery
of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling
blindly with itself. I kept my head pretty well; but when I had him at
last stretched on the couch, I wiped my forehead, while my legs shook
under me as though I had carried half a ton on my back down that hill.
And yet I had only supported him, his bony arm clasped round my
neck—and he was not much heavier than a child.
“When next day we left at noon, the crowd, of whose presence behind the
curtain of trees I had been acutely conscious all the time, flowed out
of the woods again, filled the clearing, covered the slope with a mass
of naked, breathing, quivering, bronze bodies. I steamed up a bit, then
swung down stream, and two thousand eyes followed the evolutions of the
splashing, thumping, fierce river-demon beating the water with its
terrible tail and breathing black smoke into the air. In front of the
first rank, along the river, three men, plastered with bright red earth
from head to foot, strutted to and fro restlessly. When we came abreast
again, they faced the river, stamped their feet, nodded their horned
heads, swayed their scarlet bodies; they shook towards the fierce
river-demon a bunch of black feathers, a mangy skin with a pendent
tail—something that looked a dried gourd; they shouted periodically
together strings of amazing words that resembled no sounds of human
language; and the deep murmurs of the crowd, interrupted suddenly, were
like the responses of some satanic litany.
“We had carried Kurtz into the pilot-house: there was more air there.
Lying on the couch, he stared through the open shutter. There was an
eddy in the mass of human bodies, and the woman with helmeted head and
tawny cheeks rushed out to the very brink of the stream. She put out
her hands, shouted something, and all that wild mob took up the shout
in a roaring chorus of articulated, rapid, breathless utterance.
“‘Do you understand this?’ I asked.
“He kept on looking out past me with fiery, longing eyes, with a
mingled expression of wistfulness and hate. He made no answer, but I
saw a smile, a smile of indefinable meaning, appear on his colourless
lips that a moment after twitched convulsively. ‘Do I not?’ he said
slowly, gasping, as if the words had been torn out of him by a
supernatural power.
“I pulled the string of the whistle, and I did this because I saw the
pilgrims on deck getting out their rifles with an air of anticipating a
jolly lark. At the sudden screech there was a movement of abject terror
through that wedged mass of bodies. ‘Don’t! don’t you frighten them
away,’ cried some one on deck disconsolately. I pulled the string time
after time. They broke and ran, they leaped, they crouched, they
swerved, they dodged the flying terror of the sound. The three red
chaps had fallen flat, face down on the shore, as though they had been
shot dead. Only the barbarous and superb woman did not so much as
flinch, and stretched tragically her bare arms after us over the sombre
and glittering river.
“And then that imbecile crowd down on the deck started their little
fun, and I could see nothing more for smoke.
“The brown current ran swiftly out of the heart of darkness, bearing us
down towards the sea with twice the speed of our upward progress; and
Kurtz’s life was running swiftly, too, ebbing, ebbing out of his heart
into the sea of inexorable time. The manager was very placid, he had no
vital anxieties now, he took us both in with a comprehensive and
satisfied glance: the ‘affair’ had come off as well as could be wished.
I saw the time approaching when I would be left alone of the party of
‘unsound method.’ The pilgrims looked upon me with disfavour. I was, so
to speak, numbered with the dead. It is strange how I accepted this
unforeseen partnership, this choice of nightmares forced upon me in the
tenebrous land invaded by these mean and greedy phantoms.
“Kurtz discoursed. A voice! a voice! It rang deep to the very last. It
survived his strength to hide in the magnificent folds of eloquence the
barren darkness of his heart. Oh, he struggled! he struggled! The
wastes of his weary brain were haunted by shadowy images now—images of
wealth and fame revolving obsequiously round his unextinguishable gift
of noble and lofty expression. My Intended, my station, my career, my
ideas—these were the subjects for the occasional utterances of elevated
sentiments. The shade of the original Kurtz frequented the bedside of
the hollow sham, whose fate it was to be buried presently in the mould
of primeval earth. But both the diabolic love and the unearthly hate of
the mysteries it had penetrated fought for the possession of that soul
satiated with primitive emotions, avid of lying fame, of sham
distinction, of all the appearances of success and power.
“Sometimes he was contemptibly childish. He desired to have kings meet
him at railway-stations on his return from some ghastly Nowhere, where
he intended to accomplish great things. ‘You show them you have in you
something that is really profitable, and then there will be no limits
to the recognition of your ability,’ he would say. ‘Of course you must
take care of the motives—right motives—always.’ The long reaches that
were like one and the same reach, monotonous bends that were exactly
alike, slipped past the steamer with their multitude of secular trees
looking patiently after this grimy fragment of another world, the
forerunner of change, of conquest, of trade, of massacres, of
blessings. I looked ahead—piloting. ‘Close the shutter,’ said Kurtz
suddenly one day; ‘I can’t bear to look at this.’ I did so. There was a
silence. ‘Oh, but I will wring your heart yet!’ he cried at the
invisible wilderness.
“We broke down—as I had expected—and had to lie up for repairs at the
head of an island. This delay was the first thing that shook Kurtz’s
confidence. One morning he gave me a packet of papers and a
photograph—the lot tied together with a shoe-string. ‘Keep this for
me,’ he said. ‘This noxious fool’ (meaning the manager) ‘is capable of
prying into my boxes when I am not looking.’ In the afternoon I saw
him. He was lying on his back with closed eyes, and I withdrew quietly,
but I heard him mutter, ‘Live rightly, die, die...’ I listened. There
was nothing more. Was he rehearsing some speech in his sleep, or was it
a fragment of a phrase from some newspaper article? He had been writing
for the papers and meant to do so again, ‘for the furthering of my
ideas. It’s a duty.’
“His was an impenetrable darkness. I looked at him as you peer down at
a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never
shines. But I had not much time to give him, because I was helping the
engine-driver to take to pieces the leaky cylinders, to straighten a
bent connecting-rod, and in other such matters. I lived in an infernal
mess of rust, filings, nuts, bolts, spanners, hammers,
ratchet-drills—things I abominate, because I don’t get on with them. I
tended the little forge we fortunately had aboard; I toiled wearily in
a wretched scrap-heap—unless I had the shakes too bad to stand.
“One evening coming in with a candle I was startled to hear him say a
little tremulously, ‘I am lying here in the dark waiting for death.’
The light was within a foot of his eyes. I forced myself to murmur,
‘Oh, nonsense!’ and stood over him as if transfixed.
“Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have
never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn’t touched. I
was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that
ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven
terror—of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again
in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that
supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some
image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a
breath:
“‘The horror! The horror!’
“I blew the candle out and left the cabin. The pilgrims were dining in
the mess-room, and I took my place opposite the manager, who lifted his
eyes to give me a questioning glance, which I successfully ignored. He
leaned back, serene, with that peculiar smile of his sealing the
unexpressed depths of his meanness. A continuous shower of small flies
streamed upon the lamp, upon the cloth, upon our hands and faces.
Suddenly the manager’s boy put his insolent black head in the doorway,
and said in a tone of scathing contempt:
“‘Mistah Kurtz—he dead.’
“All the pilgrims rushed out to see. I remained, and went on with my
dinner. I believe I was considered brutally callous. However, I did not
eat much. There was a lamp in there—light, don’t you know—and outside
it was so beastly, beastly dark. I went no more near the remarkable man
who had pronounced a judgment upon the adventures of his soul on this
earth. The voice was gone. What else had been there? But I am of course
aware that next day the pilgrims buried something in a muddy hole.
“And then they very nearly buried me.
“However, as you see, I did not go to join Kurtz there and then. I did
not. I remained to dream the nightmare out to the end, and to show my
loyalty to Kurtz once more. Destiny. My destiny! Droll thing life
is—that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose.
The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself—that comes
too late—a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with
death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes
place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing
around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the
great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly
atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right,
and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of
ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it
to be. I was within a hair’s breadth of the last opportunity for
pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would have
nothing to say. This is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz was a
remarkable man. He had something to say. He said it. Since I had peeped
over the edge myself, I understand better the meaning of his stare,
that could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to
embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts
that beat in the darkness. He had summed up—he had judged. ‘The
horror!’ He was a remarkable man. After all, this was the expression of
some sort of belief; it had candour, it had conviction, it had a
vibrating note of revolt in its whisper, it had the appalling face of a
glimpsed truth—the strange commingling of desire and hate. And it is
not my own extremity I remember best—a vision of greyness without form
filled with physical pain, and a careless contempt for the evanescence
of all things—even of this pain itself. No! It is his extremity that I
seem to have lived through. True, he had made that last stride, he had
stepped over the edge, while I had been permitted to draw back my
hesitating foot. And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps
all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed
into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the
threshold of the invisible. Perhaps! I like to think my summing-up
would not have been a word of careless contempt. Better his cry—much
better. It was an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable
defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions. But it was
a victory! That is why I have remained loyal to Kurtz to the last, and
even beyond, when a long time after I heard once more, not his own
voice, but the echo of his magnificent eloquence thrown to me from a
soul as translucently pure as a cliff of crystal.