Heart of Darkness
bursting shells, had come to them, an insoluble mystery from the sea.
All their meagre breasts panted together, the violently dilated
nostrils quivered, the eyes stared stonily uphill. They passed me
within six inches, without a glance, with that complete, deathlike
indifference of unhappy savages. Behind this raw matter one of the
reclaimed, the product of the new forces at work, strolled
despondently, carrying a rifle by its middle. He had a uniform jacket
with one button off, and seeing a white man on the path, hoisted his
weapon to his shoulder with alacrity. This was simple prudence, white
men being so much alike at a distance that he could not tell who I
might be. He was speedily reassured, and with a large, white, rascally
grin, and a glance at his charge, seemed to take me into partnership in
his exalted trust. After all, I also was a part of the great cause of
these high and just proceedings.
“Instead of going up, I turned and descended to the left. My idea was
to let that chain-gang get out of sight before I climbed the hill. You
know I am not particularly tender; I’ve had to strike and to fend off.
I’ve had to resist and to attack sometimes—that’s only one way of
resisting—without counting the exact cost, according to the demands of
such sort of life as I had blundered into. I’ve seen the devil of
violence, and the devil of greed, and the devil of hot desire; but, by
all the stars! these were strong, lusty, red-eyed devils, that swayed
and drove men—men, I tell you. But as I stood on this hillside, I
foresaw that in the blinding sunshine of that land I would become
acquainted with a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious
and pitiless folly. How insidious he could be, too, I was only to find
out several months later and a thousand miles farther. For a moment I
stood appalled, as though by a warning. Finally I descended the hill,
obliquely, towards the trees I had seen.
“I avoided a vast artificial hole somebody had been digging on the
slope, the purpose of which I found it impossible to divine. It wasn’t
a quarry or a sandpit, anyhow. It was just a hole. It might have been
connected with the philanthropic desire of giving the criminals
something to do. I don’t know. Then I nearly fell into a very narrow
ravine, almost no more than a scar in the hillside. I discovered that a
lot of imported drainage-pipes for the settlement had been tumbled in
there. There wasn’t one that was not broken. It was a wanton smash-up.
At last I got under the trees. My purpose was to stroll into the shade
for a moment; but no sooner within than it seemed to me I had stepped
into the gloomy circle of some Inferno. The rapids were near, and an
uninterrupted, uniform, headlong, rushing noise filled the mournful
stillness of the grove, where not a breath stirred, not a leaf moved,
with a mysterious sound—as though the tearing pace of the launched
earth had suddenly become audible.
“Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees leaning against the
trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the
dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair.
Another mine on the cliff went off, followed by a slight shudder of the
soil under my feet. The work was going on. The work! And this was the
place where some of the helpers had withdrawn to die.
“They were dying slowly—it was very clear. They were not enemies, they
were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now—nothing but black
shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish
gloom. Brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality
of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar
food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl
away and rest. These moribund shapes were free as air—and nearly as
thin. I began to distinguish the gleam of the eyes under the trees.
Then, glancing down, I saw a face near my hand. The black bones
reclined at full length with one shoulder against the tree, and slowly
the eyelids rose and the sunken eyes looked up at me, enormous and
vacant, a kind of blind, white flicker in the depths of the orbs, which
died out slowly. The man seemed young—almost a boy—but you know with
them it’s hard to tell. I found nothing else to do but to offer him one
of my good Swede’s ship’s biscuits I had in my pocket. The fingers
closed slowly on it and held—there was no other movement and no other
glance. He had tied a bit of white worsted round his neck—Why? Where
did he get it? Was it a badge—an ornament—a charm—a propitiatory act?
Was there any idea at all connected with it? It looked startling round
his black neck, this bit of white thread from beyond the seas.
“Near the same tree two more bundles of acute angles sat with their
legs drawn up. One, with his chin propped on his knees, stared at
nothing, in an intolerable and appalling manner: his brother phantom
rested its forehead, as if overcome with a great weariness; and all
about others were scattered in every pose of contorted collapse, as in
some picture of a massacre or a pestilence. While I stood
horror-struck, one of these creatures rose to his hands and knees, and
went off on all-fours towards the river to drink. He lapped out of his
hand, then sat up in the sunlight, crossing his shins in front of him,
and after a time let his woolly head fall on his breastbone.
“I didn’t want any more loitering in the shade, and I made haste
towards the station. When near the buildings I met a white man, in such
an unexpected elegance of get-up that in the first moment I took him
for a sort of vision. I saw a high starched collar, white cuffs, a
light alpaca jacket, snowy trousers, a clean necktie, and varnished
boots. No hat. Hair parted, brushed, oiled, under a green-lined parasol
held in a big white hand. He was amazing, and had a penholder behind
his ear.
“I shook hands with this miracle, and I learned he was the Company’s
chief accountant, and that all the book-keeping was done at this
station. He had come out for a moment, he said, ‘to get a breath of
fresh air. The expression sounded wonderfully odd, with its suggestion
of sedentary desk-life. I wouldn’t have mentioned the fellow to you at
all, only it was from his lips that I first heard the name of the man
who is so indissolubly connected with the memories of that time.
Moreover, I respected the fellow. Yes; I respected his collars, his
vast cuffs, his brushed hair. His appearance was certainly that of a
hairdresser’s dummy; but in the great demoralization of the land he
kept up his appearance. That’s backbone. His starched collars and
got-up shirt-fronts were achievements of character. He had been out
nearly three years; and, later, I could not help asking him how he
managed to sport such linen. He had just the faintest blush, and said
modestly, ‘I’ve been teaching one of the native women about the
station. It was difficult. She had a distaste for the work.’ Thus this
man had verily accomplished something. And he was devoted to his books,
which were in apple-pie order.
“Everything else in the station was in a muddle—heads, things,
buildings. Strings of dusty niggers with splay feet arrived and
departed; a stream of manufactured goods, rubbishy cottons, beads, and
brass-wire sent into the depths of darkness, and in return came a
precious trickle of ivory.
“I had to wait in the station for ten days—an eternity. I lived in a
hut in the yard, but to be out of the chaos I would sometimes get into
the accountant’s office. It was built of horizontal planks, and so
badly put together that, as he bent over his high desk, he was barred
from neck to heels with narrow strips of sunlight. There was no need to
open the big shutter to see. It was hot there, too; big flies buzzed
fiendishly, and did not sting, but stabbed. I sat generally on the
floor, while, of faultless appearance (and even slightly scented),
perching on a high stool, he wrote, he wrote. Sometimes he stood up for
exercise. When a truckle-bed with a sick man (some invalid agent from
upcountry) was put in there, he exhibited a gentle annoyance. ‘The
groans of this sick person,’ he said, ‘distract my attention. And
without that it is extremely difficult to guard against clerical errors
in this climate.’
“One day he remarked, without lifting his head, ‘In the interior you
will no doubt meet Mr. Kurtz.’ On my asking who Mr. Kurtz was, he said
he was a first-class agent; and seeing my disappointment at this
information, he added slowly, laying down his pen, ‘He is a very
remarkable person.’ Further questions elicited from him that Mr. Kurtz
was at present in charge of a trading-post, a very important one, in
the true ivory-country, at ‘the very bottom of there. Sends in as much
ivory as all the others put together...’ He began to write again. The
sick man was too ill to groan. The flies buzzed in a great peace.
“Suddenly there was a growing murmur of voices and a great tramping of
feet. A caravan had come in. A violent babble of uncouth sounds burst
out on the other side of the planks. All the carriers were speaking
together, and in the midst of the uproar the lamentable voice of the
chief agent was heard ‘giving it up’ tearfully for the twentieth time
that day.... He rose slowly. ‘What a frightful row,’ he said. He
crossed the room gently to look at the sick man, and returning, said to
me, ‘He does not hear.’ ‘What! Dead?’ I asked, startled. ‘No, not yet,’
he answered, with great composure. Then, alluding with a toss of the
head to the tumult in the station-yard, ‘When one has got to make
correct entries, one comes to hate those savages—hate them to the
death.’ He remained thoughtful for a moment. ‘When you see Mr. Kurtz’
he went on, ‘tell him from me that everything here’—he glanced at the
deck—‘is very satisfactory. I don’t like to write to him—with those
messengers of ours you never know who may get hold of your letter—at
that Central Station.’ He stared at me for a moment with his mild,
bulging eyes. ‘Oh, he will go far, very far,’ he began again. ‘He will
be a somebody in the Administration before long. They, above—the
Council in Europe, you know—mean him to be.’
“He turned to his work. The noise outside had ceased, and presently in
going out I stopped at the door. In the steady buzz of flies the
homeward-bound agent was lying finished and insensible; the other, bent
over his books, was making correct entries of perfectly correct
transactions; and fifty feet below the doorstep I could see the still
tree-tops of the grove of death.
“Next day I left that station at last, with a caravan of sixty men, for
a two-hundred-mile tramp.
“No use telling you much about that. Paths, paths, everywhere; a
stamped-in network of paths spreading over the empty land, through the
long grass, through burnt grass, through thickets, down and up chilly
ravines, up and down stony hills ablaze with heat; and a solitude, a
solitude, nobody, not a hut. The population had cleared out a long time
ago. Well, if a lot of mysterious niggers armed with all kinds of
fearful weapons suddenly took to travelling on the road between Deal
and Gravesend, catching the yokels right and left to carry heavy loads
for them, I fancy every farm and cottage thereabouts would get empty
very soon. Only here the dwellings were gone, too. Still I passed
through several abandoned villages. There’s something pathetically
childish in the ruins of grass walls. Day after day, with the stamp and
shuffle of sixty pair of bare feet behind me, each pair under a 60-lb.
load. Camp, cook, sleep, strike camp, march. Now and then a carrier
dead in harness, at rest in the long grass near the path, with an empty
water-gourd and his long staff lying by his side. A great silence