PART 1

The Nellie, a small sailboat, was anchored in the river. There was no wind and the only thing to do was sit and wait for the tide to change before heading down the river and out to sea.

The mouth of the River Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an endless waterway. Far off in the distance, the sea and the sky blended seamlessly together. Nearby, barges sailing up the river seemed to stand still. A haze rested on the low shores as far as we could see. The air was dark above the port town of Gravesend. Behind us, up the river, the gloomy air hung motionless over the biggest and greatest town on earth, London.

The Director of Companies was our captain and our host. Four of us watched him affectionately as he stared out at the sea. On the whole river there was nothing that looked half as appropriate as he did. He looked the part, which to a sailor is the most important sign of trustworthiness. It was hard to remember that he worked behind us, in the gloomy city, rather than out on the glowing water.

The sea bonded us sailors. The long periods at sea, separated from everyone else, brought us closer together and made us tolerant of each other’s stories and beliefs. The Lawyer, a great guy, got to use the only cushion on the deck because he’d served on board for so long. The Accountant had brought out a box of dominos and was building shapes out of the boney pieces. Marlow sat cross-legged in the back, leaning against a mast. He had sunken cheeks, a yellow complexion, a straight back, and a sour demeanor. With his arms dropped and the palms of his hands facing up, he looked like a statue of a god. The Director, satisfied that the anchor was secure, made his way back and sat with us. We chatted lazily but soon fell into silence. For some reason or other we never played that game of dominos. We were all lost in our own thoughts, up for nothing but sitting and staring. The day was ending with incredible calm. The water was shining peacefully. The spotless sky was a giant blanket of pure light. The mist over the Essex Marsh was like a gauzy and bright fabric hung from the trees and draped over the shore. Only the gloom to the west became more gloomy by the minute, as if growing angry at the ending day.

At last, almost without us noticing, the sun sank. It changed from glowing white to a dull red without rays or heat, like it was about to die or be snuffed out by the gloom hanging over the crowded city.

At once the water changed, becoming even calmer but less colorful. The old river rested peacefully at the end of the day, spreading calmly to the ends of the earth. For ages, the river has performed good service to the people who live on its banks. We looked at the river as only sailors could, with respect and affection and with an awareness of its great past. The river’s tides carry the memories of the men and ships they brought home or took into battle. The river has known and served all of the nation’s heroes, from Sir Francis Drake to Sir John Franklin, all great knights of the sea. It had carried all the ships whose names live forever, like the Golden Hind , filled with treasure, or the Erebus and Terror , ships that left and never returned. The river remembered the men as well as the ships. They had sailed from Deptford, from Greenwich, and from Erith. The sailors included kings and businessmen, captains, admirals, unsavory traders, and the so-called conquerors of the East Indies. Whether they were in search of gold or fame, they all left on that river carrying swords and often a spark from the sacred fire of civilization.

Was there any greatness that had not passed down that river and out into the mysterious world? The dreams of men, the beginnings of nations, and the seeds of empires had all sailed its waters.

The sun set. The river grew dark and lights appeared along the shore. The Chapman lighthouse, standing on three legs in the mud, shone strongly. The lights of many ships were visible in the distance, all jumbled together. Further west, the sky above the monstrous town was still gloomy and dark under the light of the stars.

“And this also,” said Marlow out of nowhere, “has been one of the darkest places of the earth.”

He was the only one of us who spent all of his time as a sailor, with no fixed home. The worst thing you could say about him was that he was not like other sailors. He was a seaman, but he was a wanderer too. As strange as it may sound, the truth is most seamen lead sedentary lives. They are homebodies and their home—the ship—is always with them. They are citizens of the sea. One ship is just like any other and the sea is the same everywhere. Because their surroundings are always they same, they ignore the foreign lands and people they come across. The only mystery the seaman cares about is the sea itself, which controls his fate and cannot be predicted. After his work is done, the seaman takes a short walk on shore and believes that he has seen all of a continent that he needs to. Any other secrets a place may hold are not secrets that he thinks are worth finding out. Similarly, the stories seamen tell are simple and direct. They reveal their meaning as easily as a shell reveals its nut. But Marlow was different, though he sure liked to tell a tale. To him, the meaning of a story was not like a nut that could be easily removed from its shell. To Marlow, the point of a story was the shell itself—the narration. And just like light will reveal the haze, storytelling will bring things to light that you might not have seen otherwise.

His remark wasn’t really surprising. In fact, it was just like him to say something like that. No one even bothered to grunt in response. So he said, very slowly, “I was thinking of when the Romans first came here 1,900 years ago—it might as well have been a day ago, considering to the long history of the earth. Great men may have come down this river, but really that greatness is like a flash of lightning in the clouds. All of life is in that brief flicker of light, and hopefully it will last as long as the old earth keeps rolling. But we should remember that from the earth’s perspective, it was dark only yesterday. Imagine what it must have been like to be a Roman sea-captain, suddenly sent here from home. He had to travel all the way across Europe on foot and sail in one of those boats that Roman soldiers supposedly could build hundreds of in a month. Imagine him here. This was the very end of the world then. The sea was the color of lead and the sky was the color of smoke. His ship was about as sturdy as a heavy piano on thin legs. And he had to sail up this river with supplies, passing forests and swamps and savages, with almost nothing to eat and nothing to drink but water from the river. He didn’t have any of that great Roman wine. He couldn’t go ashore. Every once in a while he would pass a military camp lost in the wilderness, like a needle in a haystack. He sailed on through cold, fog, storms, disease, and death. Death lurked around in the air, in the water, in the bush. They must have been dying like flies here. Oh, yes, he did it. He probably did it very well, too, and without thinking much about it except for the stories he could brag about later. They were men enough to face the darkness. And maybe he was encouraged by the possibility that he’d get promoted if he survived and knew the right people back in Rome. Or think of

a decent young Roman citizen in a toga, someone who’d lost his fortune gambling, maybe, and was coming out here to make some money. He lands in a swamp, marches through the woods, and in some post deep in the country, he’s struck by how totally savage everything is around him. He is surrounded by all the mysterious life stirring in the forest, in the jungles, and in the hearts of the wild men. Nothing can prepare a man for that life. He just has to start living in it one day, in the middle of all of that awful confusion. But he’s drawn to that crazy savage life as well. Horrible things can be so fascinating. He starts to feel regret. He longs to go home but is disgusted by his powerlessness to escape. Then he surrenders to it all and fills with hate.”

He paused.

“Of course,” he said, shifting his pose so that he looked like Buddha dressed in European clothes, “none of us would feel exactly that same way. What keeps us from feeling that way is that we’re modern and organized. Really, those Roman guys weren’t all that great. They were powerful and strong and defeated their enemies, but they couldn’t rule faraway places. All they did was steal. And even strength is relative. Everyone else at that time was just so weak. The Romans stole what they could because they could get away with it. It was nothing but violent robbery, aggravated murder on a grand scale, and the robbers were blind, which is fitting since they were attacking a land of darkness. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means taking it away from people with different colored skin or flatter noses, is not a pretty thing when you think about it. The only good thing about it is the idea behind it. Not some pretty words you can use to describe it, but a real and powerful idea that men will unselfishly sacrifice themselves for—something that men will bow down to and worship…”

He stopped talking. Reflections in the water looked like green and red and white flames dancing around each other. Life in the great city went on in the dark night. The river didn’t rest. We sat there patiently. There was nothing else to do until the tide changed. After a long pause, he said, in a shaky voice, “I guess you guys know that I once worked on a river boat.” We knew then that our fates were sealed. We were going to hear about one of Marlow’s strange experiences.

“I don’t want to talk about my personal life,” he said, apparently unaware that that’s what we would have liked most. “But to understand what happened you need to know how I got out there, what I saw, and how I went up the river to the place where I first met the poor fellow. It was as far as you could sail up the river and it was what all of my experiences there were leading up to. It put everything else I saw in a new light, a light that showed me my own thoughts differently. It was depressing and not very clear. No, not very clear. But somehow it seemed to cast a new light on everything.

“I’d just gotten back to London after sailing all over the East—the Pacific and Indian Oceans, the China Seas. I was kind of hanging around, not doing much but staying with friends and bothering them, almost like I was a missionary invading their land. It was fine for a little bit, but after a while I got tired of resting. I began to look for a ship, which is hard work. But no ship would have me, and that got old fast.

“When I was a kid, I really liked maps. I would spend hours looking at South America or Africa or Australia and daydreaming about being a great explorer. There were many blank spaces on the map then, and when I saw one that seemed interesting (but they all look like that), I’d put my finger on it and

say, ‘When I grow up, I will go there.’ The North Pole was one of those places, I remember. Well, I haven’t been there yet and won’t try to go now. It doesn’t seem as exotic anymore. Other places were scattered all over the globe. I’ve been in some of them, and . . . well, we won’t talk about that. But there was one spot that was the biggest and blankest, and that’s where I wanted to go the most.

“Actually, by the time of my story, it wasn’t a blank space anymore. In the time since I was a child, it had been filled in with rivers and lakes and names. It stopped being a blank space of delightful mystery, a white patch for a boy to dream about. It had become a place of darkness. But there was one special river in it, a huge river that looked like a giant snake with its head in the sea, its body curling over a vast land, and its tail disappearing somewhere deep in the country. I stared at a map of this land in a store window, looking something like a silly bird staring at a snake. That’s when I remembered that there was a big company that did business on that river. Well, hell, I thought, they can’t buy and sell anything on the river without using steamboats, and I could sail one of those. As I walked away I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The snake had charmed me.

“The company had its headquarters on the European Continent, not in London. I have a lot of relatives who live on the Continent because it’s cheap and not as nasty as it looks, according to them.

“I’m embarrassed to admit that I started pestering them about getting me a job with the Company. This was new to me. I wasn’t used to getting work that way; I always took care of myself. But I felt like I had to do everything I could to get to that river. So I pestered them. The men said ‘My dear fellow’ and did nothing. Then, if you can believe it, I asked the women. I, Charlie Marlow, put the women to work getting me a job. Good God! Well, you see, I was obsessed. I had an aunt, a sweet old woman. She wrote: ‘It will be delightful. I am ready to do anything for you. It is a glorious idea. I know the wife of a very important man in the Administration, and a man who has lots of influence with so-and-so,’ and so on. She was determined to get me a job as the captain of a river steamboat if that’s what I wanted.

“I got the job, of course, and I got it very quickly. Apparently one of the steamboat captains had been killed in a fight with the natives. This was my big break and it made me all the more excited about going. It was only months and months later, while attempting to recover what was left of the captain’s body, that I found out that the fight was over some hens. Yes, two black hens. Fresleven was the guy’s name; he was Danish. He thought he got a raw deal, so he went ashore and started to hammer the chief of the village with a stick. I wasn’t surprised to hear this and at the same time hear that Fresleven was the nicest, quietest guy they’d ever met. I’m sure he was. But he’d already been out there in the jungle on his ‘noble mission’ for a couple of years and probably needed to make himself feel big. So he beat the chief in front of a big crowd of stunned villagers until one of them, supposedly the chief’s son, tried jabbing the white man with a spear. It worked, of course: he got Fresleven right between the shoulder blades and killed him. All the villagers ran off into the forest, afraid that something terrible would happen because they’d killed a white man. Fresleven’s crew also panicked and ran away. Nobody seemed to care about picking up the body until I showed up and stepped into his shoes. I felt like I shouldn’t let it sit there, but when I finally had a chance to meet the man whose job I now had, the grass growing through his ribs was tall enough to hide his bones, which were all there. The natives had thought white men had magical powers, so they hadn’t touched his body. And they had apparently fled

the village. Their huts were rotting and falling down. Something terrible had happened after all. Terror had sent them running through the bush and they never returned. I don’t know what happened to the hens either. ‘Progress’ probably got them too. In any case, because of this fiasco, I got my job.

“I ran around like crazy getting ready, and in less than two days I crossed the Channel to sign my contract. I soon arrived in a city that always makes me think of a giant white tomb. That’s probably prejudice on my part. It was easy to find the Company’s office. It was the biggest thing in town and everybody I met was talking about it. They said they were going to have an empire and make more money than you could count.

“I went down a narrow, dark, deserted street that was lined with high houses, all with their blinds drawn. Everything was silent and there was grass growing everywhere. The Company’s building had two huge double doors that were slightly open. I slipped through the crack, went up a clean, undecorated staircase that was as lifeless as a desert. I opened the first door I came to. Two women, one fat and the other slim, sat on stools, knitting black wool. The slim one got up and walked straight to me. She kept her eyes on her knitting and I was about to step out of her way, like you would for a sleepwalker, when she stopped and looked up. Her dress was a plain as an umbrella, and she turned around without saying anything and led me into a waiting room. I gave my name and looked around. There was a table in the middle of the room, plain chairs lined up on the walls, and at one end, a large map marked with all the colors of the rainbow. There was a vast amount of red on the map, which was good to see because it meant that something good was happening in those places. There was a lot of blue, a little green, some smears of orange, and, on the East Coast, a purple patch showing where happy pioneers were drinking lager. But I wasn’t going to any of those places. I was going into the yellow. It was dead in the center of the map. And the river was there, as fascinating and deadly as a snake. A door opened and a secretary poked her white but friendly head out and called me in with a wave of a skinny finger. The light was low and a heavy writing desk squatted in the middle of the room. Behind it was a pale blob in a dress coat. It was the great man himself. He was about five foot six inches and had millions at his fingertips. He shook hands, mumbled vaguely, and was satisfied with my French. Bon voyage.

“In about forty-five seconds I was back in the waiting room with the friendly-looking secretary, who made me sign some document. I think I agreed not to reveal any Company secrets. Well, I’m not going to.

“I began to feel a little nervous. I’m not used to all those formalities, and the atmosphere in there was frightening. It was like I’d been brought into some conspiracy, something not quite right, and I was glad to get out. In the outer room the two women were still knitting the black wool. People were arriving, and the younger woman was walking back and forth introducing them. The older one sat on her chair. Her flat cloth slippers were propped up on a foot-warmer and she a cat was laying in her lap. She wore some starched white thing on her head, had a wart on one cheek, and silver-rimmed glasses hung on the tip of her nose. She glanced at me above the glasses. The quick and uninterested calm of that look troubled me. Two young guys with foolish but happy faces were being brought over, and she looked at them with the same quick glance of bored wisdom. She seemed to know all about them and all about me too. An eerie feeling came over me. She seemed mysterious and significant, almost symbolic. Later,

when I was far away from there, I would often think about those two women, guarding the door of Darkness, knitting black wool for a funeral veil, one forever introducing people to the unknown, the other glancing up at those foolish and happy faces with unconcerned old eyes. Hail, old knitter of black wool, we who are about to die salute you! Not many of those she looked at ever saw her again. Not even half.

“I had to visit the doctor. ‘Just a simple formality,’ the secretary said sympathetically. Some young fellow wearing his hat over the left eyebrow came from somewhere upstairs and took me away. I suppose he was a clerk of some kind: They must have clerks there, even though the house was as quiet as a house in a city of the dead. He was messy, with ink stains on the sleeves of his jacket. He had a large necktie under a chin shaped like the toe of an old boot. We were too early for the doctor, so I suggested that we get a drink, which perked him up a great deal. As we sat over our vermouths, he praised the Company’s business so much that I asked him why he didn’t go out there. He got very serious all at once. ‘I am not such a fool as I look, said Plato to his students,’ he said gravely. He emptied his glass quickly and completely, and we rose.

“The old doctor felt my pulse, though he seemed to be thinking about something else the whole time. ‘Good, good for there,’ he mumbled, and then excitedly asked whether I would let him measure my head. Surprised, I said Yes. He brought out some tool and used it to measure the back, the front, and every angle, taking notes carefully. He was an unshaven little man in an old coat, with his feet in slippers. I thought he was a harmless fool. ‘I always ask permission, in the interests of science, to measure the skulls of everyone going out there,’ he said. ‘And when they come back, too?’ I asked. ‘Oh, I never see them,’ he remarked, ‘and anyway, the changes take place inside.’ He smiled as though he’d heard a private joke. ‘So you are going out there. Excellent. Interesting, too.’ He gave me another sharp glance and made another note. ‘Ever any madness in your family?’ he asked in a matter-of-fact tone. I got very annoyed. ‘Is that question in the interests of science?’ I asked. ‘It would be,’ he said, without noticing my irritation, ‘interesting for science to watch the mental changes of individuals on the spot, but . . .’‘Are you a psychologist?’ I interrupted. ‘Every doctor should be a bit of one,’ he said coolly. ‘I have a theory that you guys who go out there must help me prove. This is my part of the treasures my country is taking from that place. The mere wealth I leave for others. Pardon my questions, but you are the first Englishman I’ve examined.’ I told him that I wasn’t typical of Englishmen in general. ‘If I were,’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t be talking like this with you.’ ‘What you say is profound and probably wrong,’ he said with a laugh. ‘You should avoid irritation more than exposure to the sun. Adieu. How do you English say it—goodbye? Goodbye, then. Adieu. In the tropics one must remember to keep calm more than anything else.’ He pointed his finger at me as a warning. ‘Keep calm. Keep calm.’

“The only thing I had left to do was say goodbye to my aunt, who’d been so helpful. She was proud of her success at getting me the job. I had a cup of tea, the last decent cup for a long time. We had a long quiet chat by the fire in her dainty living room. It became clear to me that she had described me to all sorts of important people as an uncommonly exceptional and gifted man, such that the Company would be lucky to have. Good God! All I was doing was taking over a cheap riverboat with a little whistle! Apparently, however, I was also a Worker, with a capital W. In her eyes I was practically a saint, bringing civilization and truth to the poor ignorant natives. People were saying a lot of stuff like that at the time,

and the poor woman got carried away by it all. She talked so much about ‘weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways’ that she made uncomfortable. I hinted that the Company existed to make money.

“‘You forget, dear Charlie, that the worker is worthy of his pay,’ she said with a smile. It’s weird how out of touch with truth women are. They live in their own world, and there has never been anything like it, and never can be. It’s too beautiful to be real, and if they tried to make it happen it would fall apart before the first sunset. Some well-known fact that we men have been living with since the beginning of time would come and knock the whole thing over.

“After this she hugged me and told me to wear flannel, be sure to write often, and so on. I don’t know why, but in the street I felt like an imposter. It was strange. I was used to taking off for any part of the world at a day’s notice without a second thought, but now I paused. The best way I can explain it to you is by saying that, for a second or two, I felt like I was about to head off to the center of the earth rather than the center of a continent.

“I left in a French steam ship. It stopped in every damn port along the way just so that the soldiers and custom house clerks could go ashore. I watched the coast. Watching the land slip by the ship is like thinking about a mystery. There it is in front of you, smiling or frowning or savage or whatever, and it’s always whispering, ‘Come and find out.’ The landscape was grim and featureless, like it was still being formed. The huge dark jungle came right up to the beach and stretched as far as the eye could see. The sun was fierce and the land looked like it was sweating. Every once in a while, a grayish-white speck with a little flag over it became visible. These were settlements from centuries past. They looked like mere dots in the enormous jungle. We kept sailing and dropping off soldiers and clerks at little tin sheds in the wilderness. The soldiers, I assume, were there to protect the clerks. I heard that some drowned making their way ashore, but nobody seemed to know for sure or even care. They were just flung into the wilderness as we passed. The coast looked the same day in and day out. It seemed like we weren’t moving at all. The trading posts we passed had names like Gran’ Bassam and Little Popo—they sounded like names out of a bad play. I felt far away from everything happening around me. The sound of the waves was comforting, like the voice of a brother. It was something natural and meaningful. Now and then a boat from the shore brought me back in touch with reality. It was being paddled by black fellows. You could see the whites of their eyes glistening from far away. They shouted and sang, and their bodies dripped with sweat. They had faces like bizarre masks, but they had a natural energy and life, like the sea itself. Their presence didn’t need to be explained. They were very comforting to look at. For a while I would feel that the world made sense and was full of straightforward facts. That feeling would not last long, however. Something would always scare it away. Once, I remember, we met a warship anchored off the coast. There was no settlement visible, but the ship was firing its guns into the forest. Apparently the French were fighting some war near there. The boat’s flag hung limp like a rag while the hull, with guns sticking out over it, rose gently and fell on the greasy, slimy waves. The ship was a tiny speck firing away into a continent. It was pointless and impossible to understand. The guns would pop, a small flame would appear from their barrels, a little white smoke would puff out, and nothing would happen. Nothing could happen. It was insane, and it only seemed more insane when someone swore to me that there was a camp of natives (or ‘enemies,’ as he called them) hidden in the jungle.

“We carried some mail out to the warship and sailed on. I heard that the men on that ship were dying of fever at a rate of three a day. We stopped at some more places with ridiculous names, places where the only things happening were death and trade. The shoreline was jagged and twisted, as if Nature herself was trying to keep intruders out. We never stopped long enough in any one place to get a real sense of it. I had only a vague feeling of wonder and fear.

“It was nearly thirty days before I saw the big river. We stopped near the government outpost at the coast, but my job on the riverboat was 200 miles upstream. So as soon as I could, I started making my way up the river.

“I hitched a ride on a little steamship. The captain was a Swede who invited me up on the bridge when he saw that I was a sailor. He was a skinny and sad young man. As we started sailing, he looked at the government outpost on the bank with disgust. ‘Been staying there?’ he asked me. I said, ‘Yes.’ ‘A fine bunch of guys those are, huh?’ he said, speaking with bitter sarcasm. ‘It’s funny what some people will do for money. I wonder what happens to those kinds of people when they go into the jungle?’ I told him that I was about to find out. ‘Ha!’ he exclaimed, shuffling from side to side while keeping one eye on the river ahead. ‘Don’t be too sure. The other day I transported a man who hanged himself on the road. He was Swedish too.’ ‘Hanged himself! Why?’ I cried. He kept looking straight ahead at the river. ‘Who knows? The sun was too much for him, or maybe the country was.’

“A rocky cliff appeared up ahead, and we could see houses on a hill, some with iron roofs. There was work going on all around, black men digging and hauling soil. It looked like a wasteland. There were rapids in the river here, and the sound of rushing water drowned out everything else. The glare of the sun on the river made it hard to see. ‘There’s your Company’s station,’ said the Swede, pointing to three wooden shacks on the hill. ‘I’ll send your things up. You have four boxes, right? So, goodbye.’

“As I walked up the hill, I passed a train engine and a railway car lying in the grass next to a boulder. The car was upside down, with one wheel missing. It looked like a dead animal. I passed more pieces of rusty machinery. In the shade off to the side I saw dark shapes moving around. I blinked and looked at the steep path. A horn tooted and the black people scattered. A heavy explosion shook the ground and a puff of smoke came out of the rocks. The cliff wasn’t changed. They were building a railway, or trying to, anyway. The cliff didn’t appear to be in the way, but they were blasting it anyway.

“I heard a clinking noise behind me. Six black men were walking single-file up the path. They were walking slowly, balancing small baskets full of dirt on their heads. Their only clothes were black rags wrapped around their waists, with bits of fabric hanging down in the back like tails. I could see every rib and every joint. Each man had an iron collar on his neck, and they were all chained together. The chains clinked as they walked. Another explosion from the dynamite made me think about the warship I had seen firing into a continent. It was the same sound. By no stretch of the imagination could these men be called enemies. They were called criminals. They broke laws they never heard of, laws that came, like the cannonballs crashing into the jungle, from the mysterious strangers who arrived from the sea. All the men panted, their nostrils shook, and their eyes stared uphill. They passed within six inches of me without a glance. They were as indifferent as death. Behind the chained men came another black man,

this one a soldier, forced to guard his brothers. He looked heartbroken and sloppy, but when he saw that there was a white man on the path, he stood up straight. White men looked so similar to him from far away that he couldn’t tell if I was one of his bosses or not. When he saw that I was not, he grinned and relaxed, like we were partners. After all, we were both part of this noble and just business.

“Instead of going up, I turned and went down the other side of the hill. I didn’t want to follow the chain gang up to the top. I’m not usually emotional or sensitive. All my life I’ve had to fight and defend myself without caring much about feelings. But as I stood on that hillside I was overwhelmed by what a terrible and colossal mistake this all was. I’ve seen violence, greed, and ruthless desire, but the lusty greed and heartlessness of the men who ran this system was astounding. Standing on that hillside, I just knew I would find out how terrible all of this greedy, treacherous, and pitiless undertaking really was. I would find all of this out several months later and a thousand miles away. But at that moment I was frozen, as if I had heard a horrible warning. I walked down the hill and wandered toward the shady spot I’d seen earlier.

“I stepped around a large hole someone had dug in the hillside for no apparent reason. It wasn’t a quarry or anything like that. It was just a hole. It was probably dug to give the so-called criminals something to do. I don’t know. Then I almost fell into a deep trench alongside the hill. It was full of broken water pipes. At last I got under the trees. I wanted to stroll in the shade for a moment, but stepping under the leaves made me feel like I was stepping into a dark hell. Nothing moved, but the sound of the rushing rapids was all around me. It sounded as though the earth was tearing apart.

“Black shapes sprawled around me, all clearly suffering. The ground shook from another explosion on the hill. The work was going on. The work! And this was where some of the workers had come to die.

“They were dying slowly. They were not enemies or criminals. They weren’t even human anymore. They were shadows of disease and starvation lying in the gloomy green shade. They had been brought from across the coast through legal contract and against their will. They were put in unfamiliar surroundings and given strange food, and they got sick and died. They were as free as the air and just as thin. I saw someone’s eyes staring at me from the shadows, and I saw a face looking up at me from the ground. The eyes glowed for a second and started to go out. He seemed young, but it was hard to tell for sure. I gave him one of the biscuits from the Swede that I had in my pocket. He gripped it with his fingers and then stopped moving. He had a bit of white cloth tied around his neck. Why? Where did he get it? Was it a badge of some kind? A decoration? A charm? Did it have any purpose at all? It looked so strange around his black neck.

“There were two more dying men nearby. One sat with his chin on his knees, staring at nothing. The other man was resting his head like he was worn out. All around them were the bodies of other workers who had collapsed. It looked like a massacre or a plague. I was horrified. One of the men crawled on all fours down to the river to drink. He lapped the water from his hand, then sat up and slumped over in the sunlight.

“I couldn’t take it anymore so I hurried to the station office. Near the buildings, I ran into a white man who was so well dressed that I thought I was dreaming. His clothes were clean and white and his boots

were shined. He wasn’t wearing a hat and his hair was slicked down. He carried an umbrella to protect himself from the sun. He had a pen behind his ear. I was amazed.

“We shook hands. He was the Company’s chief accountant. He said that he had stepped outside ‘to get a breath of fresh air.’ That was a weird thing for someone in the jungle to say, like he was an ordinary office-worker. I wouldn’t mention him except he was the one who first told me about the man who looms over all of my memories. Also, I respected the man. Yes, I respected his sharp clothes and his neat hair. He looked like a mannequin, but at least he managed to take care of himself in that awful place. That takes backbone. His fancy clothes were a sign of his character. He’d been out here for three years and I couldn’t help asking him how he kept his clothes so nice. He blushed and said, ‘I taught one of the native women to clean them. It was hard. She didn’t like doing it.’ This was quite an accomplishment. Also, he kept the Company’s books in very good order.

“Everything else at the Company station was a mess. Strings of dusty black men came and went. Cheap cotton and beads and wire went into the jungle and ivory came back out.

“I had to stay there for ten days, which felt like an eternity. I lived in a hut in the yard, but spent a lot of time in the accountant’s office so that I could be away from the chaos. His office was so poorly built that sunlight came through the cracks in the walls. The cracks were so big that you didn’t need the windows to see outside. It was hot and full of flies. I usually sat on the floor while he sat on a stool in his clean clothes and wrote. Sometimes he stood up to stretch his legs. The accountant became mildly annoyed any time a sick agent from somewhere in the jungle was brought to the station and put on a cot in his office. ‘The groans of this sick person are distracting,’ he said. ‘It’s very hard to keep from making mistakes in my books in this climate.’

“One day he said, ‘In the interior you will probably meet Mr. Kurtz.’ When I asked who Kurtz was, he said that he was a great agent for the Company. When he saw that I wasn’t impressed, he put down his pen and said, ‘He is a very remarkable person.’ He told me that Kurtz was in charge of a trading post deep in the jungle. ‘He sends in as much ivory as all of the other agents put together.’ The accountant started writing again. The man on the cot was too sick to groan. The flies buzzed all around.

“Suddenly I heard voices and the sounds of many people approaching. A caravan had come in. All of the black laborers were babbling in an ugly language. The man on the cot groaned and the accountant stood up. ‘What a racket,’ he said. He checked on the sick man and said to me, ‘He can’t hear them.’ ‘Is he dead?’ I asked. ‘No, not yet.’ He glanced outside at the shouting men. ‘When you need peace and quiet to keep the books, you come to hate those savages to death.’ He thought for a second. ‘When you see Mr. Kurtz, tell him from me that everything here is okay. I don’t like to write to him. You never know if the letter will fall into the wrong hands.’ He stared at me for a moment with his bulging eyes. ‘Oh, he will go far, very far,’ he said. ‘He will be an important man in the Company someday. The people running things back in Europe know it.’

“He went back to work. It was quiet outside and as I left I stopped to look back at the office. The flies were buzzing. The sick agent was taking his last breaths. The accountant was bent over his books,

making sure all of the numbers were correct. Fifty feet away I could see that shady area where men were dying.

“I left the next day with a caravan of sixty men. We were going on a 200-mile walk.

“There’s no point in talking about that. There were footpaths everywhere we went, leading in all sorts of directions. We didn’t see anyone else, or even any huts. The people had left a long time ago. If a lot of mysterious black guys with strange weapons started walking around England rounding up the locals and making them carry heavy loads all over the place, I bet the natives would run away too. Only here their houses were gone as well. Eventually we passed some abandoned villages. There’s something pathetic about the ruins of a grass hut. We kept walking, day after day. I could hear sixty pairs of bare feet behind me, each man carrying a sixty-pound load. All we did was camp, cook, sleep, and march. Every once in a while we’d pass a dead body in chains near the path. It was so quiet everywhere. On some nights we could hear drums far away. The sound was weird and wild, though to the natives it probably sounded no different from church bells in a Christian country. Once we passed a white man in a uniform camping near the path with an armed escort of black men. They’d been drinking and were in a giddy mood. The white man said that his job was taking care of the road. I didn’t see any road to speak of, and the only thing that had been taken care of was a middle-aged black man, who was lying next to the path with a bullet hole in his forehead. There was another white man traveling with me. He was a pretty good guy, but he was fat and kept fainting. It’s annoying to have to hold your own coat like an umbrella over a man who’s passed out. I couldn’t help asking him why on Earth he’d come there. ‘Why do you think? To make money, of course,’ he said. Then he got a fever and had to be carried by the porters, who kept complaining that he was too fat to lift. They started running away in the middle of the night. So I threatened them with severe punishments. The next day I put the hammock with the fat man out in front. Things started off okay, but an hour later I came across the hammock and the fat man wrecked in the bushes. He’d gotten nicked on the nose. He wanted me to kill one of the porters as an example, but they’d all run away by that point. I remembered what the old doctor said: ‘It would be interesting for science to watch the mental changes of individuals on the spot.’ I felt like I was becoming scientifically interesting. But that’s all beside the point. After fifteen days we met back up with the big river and hobbled into the Central Station. It was surrounded by forest and had a mud wall on one side and a fence of branches on the other three sides. There was a hole in the fence instead of a gate. The fat devil of greed was running the place. White men carrying staves wandered lazily up to look at me and then wandered off. A fat man with a black moustache came up to me. I told him I was the steamboat captain and loudly told me that my boat was sunk at the bottom of the river. Stunned, I asked what happened. ‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘The manager is here. Everything’s in order. Everybody did well. You must go see the manager now. He’s waiting for you.’

“At that point, I didn’t understand the significance of what had happened. I think I understand it now, but I’m not sure. It was all too stupid to be natural or an accident. But at the time it was just irritating. Two days earlier they had tried sailing up the river in a hurry and torn the bottom of the boat on some rocks they hit. At first, I didn’t know what to do, since my boat was sunk. Then I realized I had to fish it out of the water. I started on that the next day. Bringing the pieces up and putting it all back together took a few months.

“My first conversation with the manager was strange. He didn’t ask me to sit down, even though I’d walked twenty miles that day alone. He was average looking in his complexion, feature, manner, voice, and size. Maybe his blue eyes were a bit cold, and they could fall on you with the weight of an axe. But everything else about him was mild-mannered. He had a weird sort of half-smile, like he knew a secret. It’s hard to describe. He didn’t do it consciously, but it was most obvious at the end of anything he said. It made even ordinary statements seem mysterious. He’d been a trader here his whole life. The men obeyed him, but they didn’t respect or fear him. He made everyone feel uneasy. Not outright distrust, just uneasiness. You have no idea how effective such a power can be. He wasn’t very organized, which you could see by looking around the station. He wasn’t smart or educated. How did he get that job? Maybe because he never got sick. He’d served three terms of three years each out there. Staying healthy in the midst of so much sickness was a special power. When he went on leave, he partied wildly, like a sailor on shore. But he was similar to a sailor only on the outside. You could tell this simply by listening to him talk. He didn’t bring anything new into the world, but he kept things going. He was a great man because it was impossible to tell what motivated him. He never gave that secret away. Perhaps he had nothing in his heart at all. That thought was scary, because there was no one out there to stop him from doing whatever he wanted. Once when almost all of the other white agents at the station were sick with some tropical disease, he said, ‘Men should only come out here if they don’t have anything inside.’ He smiled that weird half-smile of his, which was like a door cracking open in a dark room. You thought you’d seen something in him, but it closed too quickly. The white men kept arguing over who got to sit where during mealtimes, so he had a big round table built. Wherever he sat was the head of the table. None of the other seats mattered. There was no arguing with him about this. He wasn’t friendly or unfriendly. He was quiet. He had a young, plump black servant from the coast, whom he allowed, even in his presence, to provoke the white men.

“He started talking as soon as he saw me. I’d been on the road for a very long time, but he couldn’t wait. He said that he had to start without me. The upriver stations had to be re-supplied. He didn’t know who was still alive and who was dead. He didn’t listen to anything I said. He kept saying that the situation was ‘very grave, very grave.’ There were rumors that Mr. Kurtz was sick and his station, the most important one, was in danger. He hoped it wasn’t true, because Mr. Kurtz was . . . I was tired and irritable. Who cares about Kurtz, I thought. I told him that I’d heard of Mr. Kurtz on the coast. ‘Ah! So they talk about him down there,’ he mumbled to himself. Then he went back to telling me that Mr. Kurtz was the best agent he had, a great man who was very important to the Company. He said that he was ‘very, very uneasy.’ He fidgeted a lot and cried out, ‘Ah, Mr. Kurtz!’ He broke the plastic on his chair, and seemed confused by this. Then he wanted to know ‘how long it would take to—’ I cut him off again. I was hungry and hadn’t even been allowed to sit down. I was furious. ‘How can I tell?’ I said. ‘I haven’t even seen the wreck yet. A few months, I’m sure.’ This conversation seemed so pointless. ‘A few months,’ he said. ‘Well, let’s say three months before we can go. Yes. That ought to be OK.’ I stormed out muttering about what an idiot he was. Afterward, I changed my mind when I realized how nice he’d been about estimating how long it would take.

“I started working the next day. I tried not to pay attention to what was happening at the station, which seemed to be the only way I could keep sane. But I had to look around sometimes, and I saw the white

agents just wandering around the station, never doing anything. I asked myself what the point of this could be. They wandered around like a bunch of soulless beasts inside a rotten fence. All they talked about was ivory. They practically prayed to it. You could smell the stupid greed like a whiff from a corpse. By God, I’ve never seen anything so unreal in my life! And the jungle surrounding this little spot seemed invincible. It was like evil or truth, simply waiting for our strange invasion to pass away.

“Oh, those months! Well, never mind. Time passed and things happened. One night a grass shed full of cloth and beads caught on fire so suddenly it was like the end of the world. I was smoking my pipe when the fat man with the black moustache came running down to the river with a tin bucket and told me that everything was OK. He scooped up about a quart of water and ran back. He didn’t see it, but there was a hole in the bottom of his bucket.

“I strolled up to the fire. There wasn’t any hurry, since the thing flamed up like a box of matches. It was useless to try to save it. The flames leapt up and drove everyone back before collapsing. The shed was a pile of ash. A black man was being beaten nearby. They said he started the fire somehow. He was screaming terribly. For a few days afterward he sat in the shade looking awful. Then he got up and wandered off into the jungle. We never saw him again. As I got close to the fire I heard two men talking. They said Kurtz’s name and ‘take advantage of this unfortunate accident.’ One of the men was the manager. I said hello. ‘Did you ever see anything like it? It’s incredible,’ he said, and walked off. The other man stayed behind. He was a young agent with a forked beard and a hooked nose. He was cold to the other agents, who thought he was the manager’s spy. I’d hardly spoken to him before. We started talking and strolled away from the fire. He asked me to come back to his room in the main building of the station. He lit a match and I saw that this young aristocrat had nice furniture and a whole candle all to himself. At that time, the manager was supposed to be the only person with candles. There were native mats hanging on the walls, as well as spears, shields, and knives. They were like hunting trophies. This man’s job was making bricks, but there weren’t any bricks anywhere in the station. He’d been there a year, waiting for all of the materials to arrive that he needed to make bricks. Since whatever the material was couldn’t be found in the country and wasn’t on its way from Europe, I didn’t know why he bothered to keep waiting. Maybe he thought the material would simply appear out of thin air. But it seemed like all of the agents were waiting for something. It didn’t seem to be a half-bad job, judging from all of the lounging around they did. But the only thing that ever came for them was disease. They spent their days complaining and plotting against each other. It was stupid. There was an atmosphere of plotting at the station, but nothing ever came of it. It was as fake as everything else, as fake as the claim that the whole operation was actually helping the natives, as fake as everything they said, as fake as their government, and as fake as their show of work. Their only true feeling was the desire to be assigned to a trading post with a lot of ivory, so they could make more money. They plotted against each other only to get ahead, but they never did any real work. There is something terrible about a world that lets one man steal a horse while another man isn’t allowed to even look at a horse’s halter.

“I didn’t know at first why the agent with the forked beard was being so friendly to me. Then I realized that he was pumping me for information. He kept dropping the names of influential people in Europe that he thought I knew. His eyes twinkled with curiosity, though he tried to act casual about it. I was surprised at first, but then I started to wonder what information I could possibly have that would be

useful to him. It was funny to see how worked up he got. The only information I had was about my steamboat parts, but he didn’t believe me. It was clear that he thought I was trying to hide something. He began to get angry, but tried to cover it up by yawning. I stood up to leave and noticed a small painting on the wall of a blindfolded woman carrying a torch. The background was almost black. She looked grand but her face was sinister.

“I stopped and stared at it. He stood next to me with his candle in an empty champagne bottle (used for medical purposes). He told me that Mr. Kurtz had painted it when he was stationed here more than a year ago. ‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘about Mr. Kurtz.’

“‘He’s the chief of the Inner Station,’ he replied quickly, looking away. ‘Thanks a lot,’ I said, laughing. ‘And you are the brickmaker of the Central Station. Everyone knows that.’ He was silent for a while. ‘He is incredible,’ he said at last. ‘He brings pity and science and progress to this place. Who knows what else.’ Suddenly he began to speak louder and more passionately. ‘We need someone to lead us in this great cause, someone with a great mind, devoted to his purpose.’ ‘Says who?’ I asked. ‘Lots of people,’ he said. ‘Some even write about it. So he comes to us, a special being, as you should know.’ ‘Why should I know that?’ I interrupted. He didn’t pay any attention to what I said. ‘Yes. Today he is chief of the best station, next year he will be assistant manager, and in two years . . . but I’m sure you know what he will be in two years. You are part of the same new gang, the gang of goodness. The same people who sent him sent you. Don’t try to deny it. I can see it with my own eyes.’ It finally dawned on me what was happening. He had heard of the influential people that my aunt knew and was trying to get on my good side. ‘Do you read the Company’s private mail?’ I asked. He didn’t have a response for that. It was fun. I acted like I was angry. ‘When Mr. Kurtz is General Manager, you won’t have the chance to read any mail at all.’

“He blew the candle out and we went outside. The moon was up. Black men wandered listlessly around, pouring water on the ashes of the fire, which hissed and steamed. The man who had been beaten was groaning somewhere. ‘What a racket the brute makes,’ said the man with the black moustache, who had come near us. ‘Serves him right. He does wrong, he gets punished. Bang! Without pity. That’s the only way. This will prevent any more fires. I was just telling the manager . . .’ He noticed the man with the forked beard and looked embarrassed. ‘Not in bed yet, huh? It’s natural. You laugh at danger.’ He walked away. “We walked down to the riverbank. I heard men talking nearby. A voice said, ‘A bunch of idiots—get out.’ The white men were standing in a group nearby, talking and waving their arms. They were holding the sticks they always carried with them. I think they slept with those sticks. On the other side of the fence the forest looked spooky in the moonlight. Despite the noises from the station, the silence of the forest was so great that it cut right through you. So much life was hidden out there. The beaten man moaned somewhere near me. He sighed so deeply that I had to walk away. I felt a hand slide under my arm. ‘My dear sir,’ said the brickmaker, ‘I don’t want you to misunderstand me, especially since you’ll see Mr. Kurtz before I do. I don’t want him to get the wrong idea of me.’

“I let him keep talking. He reminded me of a paper doll of the devil—if I poked him, there would be nothing inside but a little dirt. You see, he wanted to be the assistant to the current manager, but now both of them were quite afraid that Kurtz would take over. He talked too fast, but I didn’t try to stop

him. I was leaning against part of my steamboat that I’d hauled up on the shore like a dead animal. I could smell the mud everywhere. The mud smelled primitive, like the forest around me. The moon made everything look silver, including the river, which was silently flowing past. Everything was silent except for the brickmaker, who kept jabbering on about his career. I wondered whether the silence of nature was good or evil. What were we little creatures compared to this huge place? Could we handle it, or would it handle us? I felt how unbelievably big the jungle was, and how it didn’t care about us. What was in there? Some ivory and Mr. Kurtz, supposedly. I had heard so much about Mr. Kurtz, but I couldn’t picture him. It was like I’d been told there was an angel or a devil in there. I believed in Mr. Kurtz the same way some people believe in aliens. I once knew a man who was dead certain that there were people living on Mars. If you asked him what they looked like or how they acted, he would get shy and mutter something about ‘walking on all fours.’ If you even hinted that you thought this was silly, he would try to fight you. I wouldn’t have fought about Kurtz, but I did lie for his sake. I hate lies, not because I’m a more honest than everyone else, but because lies are like death to me. Lying makes me feel sick, like I’m biting into something rotten. But I more or less lied by letting the brickmaker believe that I had a lot of influence back in Europe. By lying I became the same as all of those false men at the station. But I lied because I thought it would somehow help Kurtz, even though the man was just a name to me. I couldn’t see the man through the name any more than you can. Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It feels like I’m trying to tell you about a dream. It’s impossible to convey the essence of a dream. There’s no way to express the sensation of strangeness and surprise that a dream causes. . .”

Marlow was silent for a while.

He stopped again, like he was thinking. Then he went added.

“Of course you can see more than I saw then. You can see me, who you know.” It had become so pitch dark that we could hardly see one another. For a long time Marlow had been nothing but a voice. No one said anything. The other sailors might have been asleep, but I was awake. I listened, hoping for something that would help me understand the uneasy feeling I got listening to this story that seemed to come straight from the night air of the river.

“ . . . Yes, I let the brickmaker keep talking,” Marlow said, “and think whatever he wanted about my influence in Europe. I did! But I didn’t have any influence behind me. There was nothing behind me but the wrecked steamboat I was leaning against. He kept talking about ‘the necessity for every man to get ahead.’ He added that ‘when you come out here, it’s not to sit around and look at the moon.’ He said that Mr. Kurtz was a ‘universal genius,’ but even a genius would have an easier time if he had the right tools—that is, the right men. He didn’t make bricks because he didn’t have the right materials. If he was spying for the manager, it was because ‘no one in their right mind would turn down an offer to do so from their superior.’ Did I understand what he meant? I saw it. What more did I want? What I really wanted was rivets, darn it! I needed to patch the hole in the steamboat. There were cases and cases of rivets back down at the coast. There were so many rivets downriver that you kicked them when you walked. But there weren’t any rivets here, where I needed them. We had metal pieces that could patch the hold in the boat, but no way to fasten them on. Every week the messenger left our station for the

coast carrying back my request for rivets. And every week a caravan came in from the coast. They brought ugly cloth, cheap beads, and cotton handkerchiefs to give to the natives for ivory. But no rivets. Three men could have brought all the rivets I needed to get the boat up and running.

“The bricklayer told me that he wasn’t afraid of God or the devil, let alone some man. I said I could see that, but what I wanted were rivets and Mr. Kurtz would also want rivets, if he knew the situation. I demanded rivets and argued that there must be some way for an intelligent man to get them. This made him get very standoffish. He started talking about a hippopotamus that lived in the river nearby. He asked whether it bothered me when I slept on my boat at night (I was always at the boat). This old hippo would wander around the station at night while the white men shot at him. It was a waste of time. ‘That animal has a charmed life,’ he said. ‘But only beasts have charmed lives here. Men can’t.’ He stood there in the moonlight for a moment, then said goodnight and walked away. I could see that he was confused and irritated, which made me feel better than I had in days. I was happy to shift my attention to my dear friend, the battered steamboat. I climbed on board. She sounded as hollow as a cookie tin. She was cheaply built and ugly, but I’d spent so much time working on her that I’d come to love her. No influential friend back in Europe would have done more for me than she did. She had given me a chance to come out here and find out what I was made of. I don’t like work anymore than the next man, but I like how work gives you a chance to find yourself. When you’re working, you’re in your own world, no one else’s. Other men can only see the outside. They can’t tell you what it really means.

“I was not surprised to see someone sitting on the boat with his legs dangling over the side. I’d started hanging around with the mechanics who worked at the station, even though the agents looked down on them. The man on the boat, a boilermaker by trade, was the head mechanic. He was a good worker. He was a lanky and bony man with a yellow face and big, intense eyes. He always looked worried. His head was as bald as my palm, but he had a beard that hung down to his waist. His wife was dead and he had six young children back home (his sister watched over them). His greatest love in life was pigeon-flying, which he talked about constantly. After work he would come over and talk about his pigeons and his children. At work, when he had to crawl through the mud under the steamboat, he would tie up his beard in loops over his ears using a white cloth. In the evenings he would carefully wash the cloth in the river then spread it over the grass to dry.

“I slapped him on the back and shouted, ‘We’re getting rivets!’ He stood up and said, ‘No! Rivets!’ like he couldn’t believe his ears. Then he whispered, ‘You did it, huh?’ I don’t know why we were acting like lunatics. I put my finger on the side of my nose and nodded, like I was giving him a secret signal. ‘Good for you!’ he said, and we did a little dance on the deck. It made a big racket, which echoed off the other bank of the river. It must have made some of the men in the station sit up in their beds. The manager came to the door of his hut, then closed it. We stopped dancing, and everything got quiet again. The jungle was like an invasion of silence. The trees and leaves looked like a wave that was about to sweep us all away. But it didn’t move. We heard snorts and splashes from the river, as though a dinosaur was taking a bath. ‘After all,’ said the mechanic, ‘why shouldn’t we get the rivets?’ I didn’t see any reason why not. ‘They’ll come in three weeks,’ I predicted.

“But they didn’t come. Instead we got an invasion. It came in parts over the next three weeks. Each part was led by a white man in new clothes and tan shoes riding a donkey. The agents were all impressed by him. A group of ragged, worn-out black porters followed him, carrying a lot of tents and boxes into the station. Five such chaotic caravans came over the next three weeks, each looking like a gang of thieves running from a supply store to divide up their loot. All of the objects looked normal on their own, but in the hands of these caravans they looked like a jumble of stolen goods.

“This invasion called itself the Eldorado Exploring Expedition. They were sworn to secrecy about their mission, so naturally they talked like pirates, bragging and cruel and greedy. None of them seemed to take anything seriously. Their only desire was to tear treasure out of the ground like burglars breaking into a safe. I don’t know who was funding the expedition, but their leader was our manager’s uncle.

“This man resembled a butcher you might find in a poor neighborhood. His eyes were shifty. He had a pot belly that he rested on his short legs, and he didn’t talk to anyone but his nephew, the manager. They walked around all day together, in constant private conversation.

“I stopped waiting for the rivets. There’s only so much of such pointless hope you can take. I said the hell with it and let it go. I had plenty of time to think and now and then would think about Kurtz. I wasn’t very interested in him. No. But I was curious to see whether this man who came out here with such a sense of purpose would rise to the top after all and what he would do once he got there.”

PART 2

“One evening I was lying on the deck of my steamboat and I heard voices nearby. It was the station manager and his uncle, the leader of the expedition. I was drifting off to sleep when I heard the manager say, ‘I am as harmless as a child, but I don’t like to be told what to do. I’m the manager, right? I was ordered to send him there. It’s unbelievable.’ I realized that they were standing beside my boat, just below my head. I was too tired to move. ‘It’s unpleasant,’ grunted the uncle. ‘He asked the Administration to be sent there,’ said the manager, ‘because he wants to show them what he can do. And they ordered me to help him. He must have so much influence. It’s almost scary, isn’t it?’ They agreed it was scary. I was drifting off to sleep, so I only caught bits of the next few sentences. ‘Make rain and fine weather . . . one man . . . the Council . . . by the nose,’ and so on. Hearing these strange bits of conversation woke me up. Then I heard the uncle clearly say, ‘The climate may solve your problems for you. Is he alone out there?’ ‘Yes,’ the manager replied. ‘He sent his assistant down the river to my station here with a sealed note. It said, “Send this devil home and don’t send me any more men like him. I’d rather be alone than have to deal with the kind of men you can send me.” That was more than a year ago. What nerve!’ ‘Have you heard anything from him since then?’ the uncle asked. ‘He sends ivory,’ spat the manager. ‘Lots of the very best ivory. And invoices for it.’ They were talking about Kurtz.

“I was wide awake by now, but I was very comfortable lying there, so I didn’t move. ‘How did he send all that ivory to you?’ asked the uncle, who seemed irritated about it. The manager explained that Kurtz sent the ivory downriver in a fleet of canoes led by his clerk. Kurtz had initially intended to return with them, but after traveling the first 300 miles, he decided to go back. He did so even though he was almost

out of supplies at his station. He took four natives with him to paddle the boat and sent the clerk and his ivory on their way. The manager and his uncle seemed amazed that anyone would do such a thing. They couldn’t figure out what Kurtz was thinking. I felt like I saw Kurtz for the first time. I had a clear image of the lone white man turning his back on his headquarters and paddling towards his empty station with four savages. I didn’t know why he did it. Perhaps he was just a good man who stuck to his work. They hadn’t said his name—they only called him ‘that man.’ His clerk, who had completed a difficult journey, was referred to as ‘that scoundrel.’ The ‘scoundrel’ said that the ‘man’ had been very sick and was only partially recovered. The two men below me moved a few paces away. I heard, ‘Military post...doctor...two hundred miles...quite alone now...unavoidable delays...nine months...no news...strange rumors.’ They passed near my boat again, just as the manager was saying, ‘No one, as far as I know, unless it was a wandering trader stealing ivory from the natives.’ Who were they talking about now? I gathered from the bits I overheard that they were referring to some man who was supposed to be in Kurtz’s district. The manager didn’t like him. ‘We’ll keep having unfair competition until we hang one of those men as an example,’ he said. ‘Absolutely,’ grunted the other. ‘Hang him! Why not? You can do anything you want in this country. That’s what I say. Nobody here can challenge you, because you can stand the climate and they can’t. You outlast them all. The danger is back in Europe, but before I left I—’ They moved away, whispering, but then their voices rose again. ‘The craziest delays. Not my fault. I did my best. And the worst part is that he was such a pain when he was here. He was always going on about how “each station should be a light on the road toward civilization as well as a trading post, a center for humanizing and teaching.” Can you believe it? That jackass. And he wants to be the manager! No, it’s—’ He was too angry to continue. I looked up and saw that they were right next to me. I could have spat on their hats. They were staring at the ground, lost in thought. The manager was brushing his leg with a twig. His uncle asked, ‘Have you been feeling well since you came out this time?’ The other jumped. ‘Who? Me? Oh, yes. I’m charmed. But the others—God, they’re all sick. They die so quickly that I don’t have time to send them out of the country. It’s unbelievable.’ ‘Right,’ grunted the uncle. ‘Right. Leave it to this,’ he said, waving his short flipper of an arm at the forest, the creek, the mud, and the river. It was like he was calling to the evil hidden in the dark forest, calling it out to bring death to the station. It was so upsetting that I jumped up and looked at the forest like I expected it to answer. You have silly thoughts like that sometimes, I’m sure. But the still jungle remained still, as if it were waiting for the men to leave.

“They both jumped and swore. I had scared them. Then they pretended like they hadn’t heard me and walked back up to the station. The sun was setting and it looked like they were dragging ridiculously long shadows after them.

“In a few days the Eldorado Expedition went into the wilderness, which swallowed them like the sea swallows a diver. A long time later we heard that all of the donkeys had died. I never heard anything about the less valuable animals. I’m sure they, like the rest of us, got what they deserved. I didn’t ask. I was excited by the possibility of meeting Kurtz. It was two months to the day from when we left the main station to when we pulled up at the bank near Kurtz’s station.

“Going up that river was like traveling back to the beginning of the world, when the plants ran wild and the trees were kings. We sailed up an empty river into a great and silent forest. The air was thick and

heavy. The sun was bright but not joyful. The river stretched out as far as we could see. Hippos and crocodiles sunned themselves on the banks. The river was so wide that it had islands in the middle. We often lost our way as we would if we were in a desert. We kept running into shoals and getting turned around. It felt like we’d been cursed to wander the river, cut off from everything we’d known in our previous life. There were moments when we were reminded of life before our journey, but those reminders were like strange dreams that we could hardly believe. The stillness all around us was not peaceful. It was the stillness of something powerful lying in wait, its intentions unknown. It looked at you like it wanted revenge. I got used to it after a while. I didn’t have time to think about it, because I had to keep steering the boat, looking for the right passageway through the islands and hidden banks and rocks. I learned to clamp my mouth shut to keep my heart from flying out when I passed the boat close to a snag in the water that would have ripped it apart and drowned us all. I had to keep an eye out for driftwood that we could cut up and use to fuel the engines the next day. When you have to pay attention to all of those things, everything else fades away. Reality fades away. But I felt it anyway. I felt it watching me, just like it watches you men, doing your jobs for a little bit of money, waiting for you to stumble—”

“Be nice, Marlow,” growled a voice on deck. I realized I wasn’t the only one awake.

“I’m sorry. I forgot how much it hurts to hear it. You men do well. And I didn’t do too badly, since I managed not to sink the boat. I still don’t know how I did it. Imagine a blindfolded man driving a carriage over a bad road. It made me sweat, that’s for sure. After all, scraping the bottom of the boat is the worst thing a sailor can do. You might not have ever told anyone about it, but you never forget the sound it makes when you hit the bottom. It’s like being hit on the heart. You remember it, you dream about it, you wake up in a cold sweat about it years later. I’m not saying the boat was always floating. Sometimes we had the natives get out and push us through shallow water. We grabbed some of those men on the way to work as a crew on the boat. Cannibals are fine people when they’re in their place. I could work with them, and I’m grateful to them for that. And after all, they didn’t eat anyone in front of me. They brought along some hippo meat, which went bad and smelled horrible. I can still smell it now. I had the manager on board as well, along with three or four of the agents. Sometimes we came across stations huddled against the bank. The white men we saw there were overjoyed to see us, but they seemed strange. They looked like prisoners held captive by a spell. They would talk to us about ivory for a while, then we would sail on. There were millions of trees lining the river like a wall. They were massive and made our boat feel like a little bug. It made you feel very small and very lost, but it wasn’t depressing exactly. After all, we had to keep crawling along. I don’t know where the agents thought they would crawl to in the end. I was crawling towards Kurtz. The steam pipes started leaking, so we crawled very slowly. The river seemed to shrink behind us and get larger in front, like we were being closed in. We sailed deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness. It was very quiet. Sometimes we would hear drums in the distance all night and into the morning. We couldn’t tell what they meant. In the morning it was chilly and perfectly quiet. A twig snapping would make you jump. We were wandering around an unknown and prehistoric planet. We were like the first men on earth, but all the land was cursed. But then we’d come around a bend and see a village. People would yell and clap and sway around. It was like prehistoric men cursing us or praying to us or welcoming us. We couldn’t tell. We couldn’t

understand our surroundings. We sailed past like ghosts, curious but horrified, as sane men would be watching a riot in an asylum. We couldn’t understand because we’d gone too far. We were traveling in the first night on Earth. There were no memories.

“The earth seemed unearthly. We are used to looking at it like a chained-up monster, but there it was monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were . . . no, not inhuman. That was the worst part, knowing that they were not inhuman. They howled and made horrible faces, but you knew that they were human just like you, that you were distant relatives. It was ugly, of course, but if you were man enough you could admit that on some level you understood those people. And why not? The mind of man is capable of anything. Everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. After all, what did we really see? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, bravery, rage, it doesn’t matter. What we saw was truth, truth without the disguises that we’ve put on it over time. Let the idiots laugh at them or fear them. The wise man knows to look at them without blinking. But he must be as much a man as the men on shore. He must meet that truth with his own strength. Principles won’t help him, and possessions are just rags that would fly away at the first good shake. No, you need a passionate belief. You need to be able to admit that you are attracted to that wildness and savagery, but also say that you have a voice that those screams and drums can’t drown out. Of course, idiots are always safe, because their fear keeps them from getting too close. Did one of you just laugh? Are you wondering whether I went ashore to howl and dance? No, I didn’t. You think these are just nice ideas? I didn’t have time for nice ideas. I was busy patching those leaky steam pipes. I had to steer around those snags and keep us moving. But there’s enough truth in what I say to save a wiser man. I also had to watch the native who manned the boiler. Looking at him was like seeing a dog in pants and a feathered hat walking on its hind legs. A few months training had turned him into a fine worker. He watched the steam gauge and the water gauge closely, bravely even. Poor guy, he had filed teeth, strange patterns cut in his hair, and ornamental scars on each cheek. He should have been dancing on the riverbank, but instead he was hard at work, under the spell of a different kind of witchcraft, full of helpful knowledge. He was useful because he’d been trained. He knew that if the water in the clear thing went away, the evil spirit inside would get angry. So he watched the gauge fearfully, with a charm made of rags tied to his arm and a bone stuck through his lower lip. And so we crawled on towards Kurtz. But the snags were thick, the water was dangerous and shallow, and the engine really did seem to have an evil spirit inside. So I didn’t have any time for strange thoughts.

“Fifty miles from the Inner Station we were surprised to see a little hut with a tattered flag in front. We pulled up to the bank to investigate. We found a board resting on a pile of firewood. On it was written ‘Wood for you. Hurry up. Be careful.’ There was a signature, but we couldn’t make it out. It wasn’t Kurtz’s, though. It was too long to be his. ‘Hurry up.’ Where? Up the river? ‘Be careful.’ We weren’t being careful when we pulled up to the station. The warning must have been referring to some other place. Something was wrong up the river. But what? That was the question. We looked around nearby, but the jungle was too thick to see very far. There was a torn red curtain hanging in the doorway of the hut. It was falling apart, but we could see that a white man had lived there recently. There was a table, a pile of trash in the corner, and a book on the floor. It didn’t have any covers and the pages were dirty and worn from being thumbed through, but the binding had been recently redone by a careful hand. It

was an incredible thing to find. It was called An Inquiry into Some Points of Seamanship, by a naval officer named Towser or Towson or something like that. It was 60 years old and looked like a boring read, full of tables and charts. I held it carefully, afraid it would fall apart in my hands. It wasn’t a very exciting book, but you could see that it was written by someone very devoted to his work. It was a book with a purpose. Flipping through it made me forget the jungle and the agents and feel like I had come across something real. Amazingly, someone had written notes in code in the margins. Imagine someone lugging a book like this into the jungle and then writing about it in code! It was truly a mystery.

“I heard some movement nearby, and I looked up to see that the manager and the agents were back on the boat. They had taken all of the firewood on board. I slipped the book into my pocket. Putting the book away was like leaving an old friend.

“I started the engine. ‘This must belong to that damn trader, the intruder,’ said the manager, looking back at the hut. ‘He must be English,’ I said. ‘That won’t protect him if he’s not careful,’ muttered the manager. I acted like I didn’t know what he was talking about and said that no man was safe from trouble in this world.

“The current was strong against us. The boat seemed like it was breathing its last breath. I expected it to give up at any moment. But we kept moving. I tried to keep track of our progress by watching the trees, but I couldn’t keep them straight. Watching one thing for so long is too much for human patience. The manager didn’t seem to be in a hurry. I was upset by the journey and wondered whether I would get to speak with Kurtz, but I realized that it didn’t matter. What difference did it make if we talked? What difference did it make who was the manager? The truth of what was going on there was buried too deep for me to see it. It was beyond my reach.

“By the next evening, we figured we were about 8 miles from Kurtz’s station. I wanted to keep going, but the manager said that it would be too dangerous in the dark. He added that if we were going to follow the mysterious warning to be careful, we should only approach during the day. That made sense. It would take us three hours to go eight miles, and I could see that there were snags in the water ahead. But I was still annoyed by the delay, even though another night could hardly make any difference. Since we had plenty of wood and were trying to be careful, I stopped the boat in the middle of the river. It was narrow there and the banks were high, like we were in a trench. It was very dark. The trees were so still they could have been made of stone. It was like being in a trance. We couldn’t hear a thing. We were deaf and blind. Around three o’clock in the morning, some large fish leaped and the sound of them splashing made me jump like someone had shot a gun. When the sun rose, everything was covered in fog. It surrounded you like something solid. Around 8 or 9, it lifted like a shutter. We got a glimpse of the huge trees and endless jungle, then the shutter came down again, like someone was sliding it. There was a loud, desperate cry that trailed off, followed by the sounds of the natives speaking to each other. It was so surprising it made my hair stand up under my hat. I don’t know how it seemed to others, but to me it was like the fog itself had screamed from all sides at once. Then came a series of horrible shrieks that were suddenly cut short. We froze. ‘Good God! What was—’ said a fat little agent in pajamas who was standing near me. Two other agents stood with their mouths hanging open for a minute, then rushed into the cabin and came back with rifles. All we could see was the boat we were standing on and

a narrow band of water surrounding it. Everything seemed to dissolve into the fog. As far as we could tell, there was nothing else in the entire world. We were nowhere. Just nowhere. It was like we had been swept away without leaving a shadow behind.

“I ordered the men to prepare to lift the anchor in case we had to leave suddenly. ‘Will they attack?’ whispered a voice. ‘We’ll be butchered in this fog,’ said another. Our hands trembled, our eyes forgot to blink. It was interesting to contrasting expressions on the white men and the black fellows, who were just as unfamiliar with that part of the river as we were. The whites were clearly upset and shaken, and looked shocked by such outrageous noises. The black men, on the other hand, looked alert but generally calm. Two of the men were even smiling as they prepared the anchor. Their headman was standing near me. ‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘Catch him,’ he said, flashing his sharp teeth. ‘Catch him and give him to us.’ ‘What would you do with him?’ ‘Eat him!’ he said, as he looked out into the fog. I would have been horrified, but it occurred to me that the natives onboard must have been very hungry. They belonged to the beginning of time, so the ridiculous contracts they were forced to sign, which said they had to work for six months, were meaningless to them. I don’t think anyone ever bothered to wonder if they knew they needed enough food for that length of time. They’d brought a lot of hippo meat aboard, but the agents hated the smell and threw much of it away. That sounds cruel, but really it was self-defense. You can’t smell hippo meat every second of the day and keep your sanity. They were each paid three pieces of brass wire every week, the idea being that they would go ashore and trade that for food in the villages we passed. You can imagine how well that worked. There were no villages, or the villagers were hostile, or the manager didn’t want to stop for whatever reason. (Like the rest of us white men, the manager ate canned food that had been brought on board, as well as the occasional goat.) So unless they ate the wire or made it into loops to catch fish, I don’t see what good it did them. I will say that it was paid regularly, as though we were in a large and distinguished company. I also saw them eat something like looked like half-cooked dough, which they kept rolled up in leaves, but it looked so unappetizing and small that I don’t understand how it kept them going. I’ll never know why on earth they didn’t kill us white men and eat us. They outnumbered us thirty to five, and they were big, powerful men, even though they were growing weak from the voyage. I saw that something was restraining them, some unlikely bit of secret humanity. I looked at them with new interest. I did so not because I thought they would eat me, though at that moment I noticed that the agents looked, well, unappetizing, and in my vanity I hoped I looked more wholesome. Perhaps that strange hope was caused by a slight fever, or simply the pressure of constantly worrying about my own health, wondering when some jungle illness would take me. In any case, I looked at them like you’d look at any other human being. I was curious about their impulses, motives, abilities, and weaknesses, especially when pushed to their physical limits. What could possibly be restraining them from eating us? Was it superstition, disgust, patience, fear, or some code of honor? No fear can stand up to hunger, no patience can outlast it, and if you’re hungry enough you can’t feel disgust anymore. As for superstition or beliefs, they are like dust in the wind when faced with starvation. Do you know what sorts of evil thoughts come into your mind when you’re starving? I do. It takes all of your inner strength to fight them off. It’s easier to face a deep personal loss or dishonor or even damnation than to face prolonged hunger. Sad, but true. And these men had no reason for any restraint. I would just as soon have expected restraint from a hyena prowling among the

corpses on a battlefield. But there they were, standing in front of me, restrained. Their behavior was even more of a mystery than the terrible screams we’d heard through the whiteness of the fog.

“Two agents were bickering about which bank of the river the sounds had come from. ‘Left,’ said one. ‘No, no. How can you tell? It’s the right.’ From behind me, the manager said, ‘This is very serious. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to Mr. Kurtz before we came up.’ I looked at him and didn’t have the slightest doubt about whether he was lying. He was the sort of man who wanted to keep up appearances. That was his restraint. But when he muttered something about us sailing on, I didn’t even bother answering him. Both of us knew that was impossible. If we pulled up our anchor, we would be completely lost, like we were floating in space. We wouldn’t be able to tell whether we were going upstream or downstream or across, at least until we hit something. Of course I did nothing. I wasn’t in the mood to wreck the boat. You couldn’t imagine a deadlier place for a shipwreck. Even if we didn’t drown immediately, we would certainly die. ‘I authorize you to take any risks necessary,’ he said. ‘I refuse to take any,’ I replied, which was exactly what he knew I would say. ‘Well, you’re the captain,’ he said. I turned my shoulder toward him and looked into the fog. How long would it last? It seemed completely hopeless. There were so many dangers on the way to Kurtz that it was as though he was a princess protected in a magic castle, rather than a man collecting ivory in the bush. ‘Do you think they’ll attack?’ asked the manager.

“I didn’t think they would attack, for some obvious reasons. For starters, the fog was too thick. If they tried to row their canoes from the bank to our ship, they would get lost, just like we would if we moved. Then again, I couldn’t see anything on the banks, but clearly they had seen us. The bushes right along the river were very thick, but apparently people could move behind them. But earlier, when the fog lifted for a moment, I didn’t see any canoes anywhere. What made the idea of an attack impossible for me to imagine was the terrible scream we’d heard. That wasn’t a war-cry. Yes, it was wild and violent, but it was filled with sorrow, not hostility. For some reason the momentary sight of our boat had filled the savages on the riverbank with uncontrollable grief. The danger, I thought, was not from an attack but from being so close to such strong emotion. Even extreme grief can ultimately lead to violence.

“You should have seen the agents staring at me! I think they thought I’d gone crazy. I practically lectured them. My dear boys, I said, there was no point in keeping a lookout. Sure, I watched the fog for signs that it was lifting, but beyond that we may as well have been buried beneath miles of cotton, for all the good our eyes were doing us. Though it might sound strange, what I said was true. And what happened later, what we called an attack, was really an attempt at protection.

“It happened about two hours after the fog lifted, roughly a mile and a half downriver from Kurtz’s station. We had just come around a bend when I saw a little grassy island in the middle of the river. It was part of a shoal, a chain of shallow patches in the water. We could see the bottom right under the water, just like you can see a man’s spine under his skin. I could steer to the right or left of this. Obviously, I was unfamiliar with the river thereabouts, but the water looked the same on either side. Since I knew Kurtz’s station was on the west side of the river, I took the western route around the shallow patch.

“As soon as we entered the channel on the west side I realized that it was much narrow than it looked. We were sandwiched between the shoal and a high, step bank covered with thick bushes. Behind the bushes were countless trees, and their branches hung out over the river. It was late in the afternoon and the forest looked very dark. There was already a long shadow on the river. We sailed through it slowly. I kept the boat near the shore, since the water was deepest there.

“The boat had two little cabins on its deck, with doors and windows. The boiler was in the front of the boat, and the machinery was on the right side. The whole boat had a thin metal roof on poles stretched over it. In my captain’s cabin, there was a couch, two stools, a loaded machine gun, a tiny table, and the steering wheel. It had a wide door in the front and shuttered windows on each side, which I always kept open. I spent my days sitting there, and my nights sleeping on the couch. An athletic native who belonged to one of the tribes from the coast was in charge of the wheel. He wore brass earrings and a long blue skirt and thought the world of himself. He was an unstable fool of a helmsman. If you were nearby, he steered the boat with a swagger, but if he was alone in the cabin, he lost control of the boat quickly.

“I was watching with annoyance as the water got shallower and shallower, when I noticed that the man holding the pole we used to tell the depth had decided to lie down on the deck. He didn’t even bother to haul in the pole, which was still in his hand but dragging in the water. Then I saw the man in charge of the boiler sit down and cover his head. I had no idea what was going on. I thought we’d hit some of the overhanging branches, because little sticks were falling all over the deck. The river, the shore, and the woods were completely quiet. All I could hear was the thump of our paddlewheel and the sound of those little sticks falling. Then it hit me: arrows! We were being shot at! I stepped into my cabin and closed the shutter facing the shore. That fool helmsman had his hands on the wheel but was stamping his feet up and down like a horse. Damn him! And we were less than ten feet from the shore. As I leaned out to close the shutter, I saw a face among the leaves. It was staring fiercely at me. And then I could see clearly all sorts of arms and legs and eyes in the dark trees. The bush was swarming with them. The leaves rustled and arrows flew out of them. I managed to close the shutter and said to the helmsman, ‘Steer her straight.’ He kept his head perfectly still but his eyes rolled and he was practically foaming at the mouth in fear. ‘Calm down!’ I said angrily. I may as well have told a tree not to sway in the wind. I ran out onto the deck. I heard a voice scream, ‘Turn back!’ and I saw another snag in the river up ahead. The agents were blasting their rifles, squirting lead into the bush. Their guns were smoking so much that I couldn’t see ahead anymore. The little arrows came in swarms. They may have been poisoned, but they looked like they couldn’t kill a cat. There was howling from the bush, and then a roar of gunfire in my ear. I turned around and saw that the helmsman had let go of the wheel and was blasting away with the machine gun. I grabbed the wheel and saw that there wasn’t time to turn us away from the snag, so I steered the boat straight toward the bank, where I knew the water was deepest.

“We tore through the overhanging branches. The gunfire stopped. Something whizzed through the cabin, in one window and out the other. The helmsman had run out of bullets and was shaking the gun at the shore, where I saw vague shapes running. Some large object appeared in the air. The helmsman suddenly dropped the gun overboard, looked at me in a strange, profound, and familiar way, and fell to the floor. His head hit the steering wheel twice. He’d tried to grab some sort of pole from someone

onshore and lost his balance. The smoke from the guns was lifting and I could see that we were clearing the snag and could move away from the bank in another hundred yards or so. I felt something warm at my feet and looked down. The helmsman was on his back staring up at me with shiny eyes, both hands still holding that pole. I realized that it wasn’t a pole. It was a spear that was stuck in his side, just below the ribs. My shoes were filling with his blood. The agents started firing again. The helmsman looked at me anxiously. He held the spear like he was afraid I was going to take it away from him. I had to force myself to stop staring at him and focus on steering. With one hand I reached up and grabbed the cord of the steam whistle. I jerked on it repeatedly, sending out screech after screech. The yells from the shore stopped and we heard a wail of terror, like all hope had been drained from the earth. There was a lot of commotion in the bush and the shower of arrows stopped. I was turning the wheel sharply when the agent in pajamas came in and said, ‘The manager asked me—Good God!’ He interrupted himself at the sight of the helmsman’s body on the floor.

“We stood over him and his shining eyes focused on both of us. It looked like he was about to ask us a question, but he died without making a sound. At the last moment, he frowned, which made his face look angry and threatening. The shininess left his eyes. ‘Can you steer?’ I asked the agent. He looked unsure, but I grabbed his arm in a way that made him realize that he was going to steer whether he knew how or not. To tell you the truth, I was mostly concerned with changing my shoes and socks. ‘He’s dead,’ mumbled the agent. ‘No doubt about it,’ I said, tugging at my shoelaces. ‘And I suppose Mr. Kurtz is dead by now as well.’

“That was my dominant thought for the moment. I felt extremely disappointed, like I had just found out that what I was searching for wasn’t real. I couldn’t have been more disgusted if I had traveled all this way up the river just to talk to Kurtz. Talk with . . . I flung one shoe overboard and realized that that was exactly what I had been looking forward to—a talk with Kurtz. I hadn’t imagined him doing anything, just talking. In my mind, he was a voice, not a body. I knew, of course, that he did things. After all, everyone talked about how much ivory he collected. That wasn’t the point for me. The point was that he was someone with special gifts, and one of those gifts was his ability to talk, his ability to turn words into illuminating beams of light or deceitful shadows from the heart of darkness.

“I threw my other shoe into that demonic river. I thought, ‘By God, it’s all over. We’re too late. He’s gone. His gift has vanished, destroyed by a spear, a club, or an arrow. I’ll never hear him speak after all.’ I felt an intense sadness, similar to the emotion felt by the savages howling in the bush. I couldn’t have felt worse if I’d missed my life’s purpose . . . Why are you sighing? You think this is absurd? Fine, it’s absurd. Good Lord! Can’t a man—here, give me some tobacco . . .”

There was a deep and silent pause. A match flared and Marlow’s face appeared for a moment. It was worn and hollow, but focused. As he lit his pipe, his face moved in and out of the darkness in the flickers of the flame. The match went out.

“Absurd!” he cried. “This is the worst part of trying to tell . . . Here you all are, with safe and sound homes and good health. Everything in your life is normal every single day. And you call me absurd! What do you expect from a man who just threw a new pair of shoes overboard? It’s surprising that I wasn’t in

tears. I’m proud of how well I held up. I was hurt by losing the chance to hear Kurtz. Of course I was wrong. That chance was still waiting for me. I heard more than enough, and I was right about him being a voice. He was little more than a voice. And I heard it, and other voices too, and they still shake me. Voices, voices . . . even the girl . . . now.”

He was silent for a long time.

“I put that image of him to rest with a lie,” he said suddenly. “Girl! What? Did I mention a girl? Let’s leave her out of it. The women should be out of it. We must keep them in that beautiful world of theirs, or our world will get worse. She had to be left out of it. You should have heard Kurtz, looking like a corpse, saying, ‘My Beloved.’ You would have seen then how clueless she had to be. And the head of Mr. Kurtz! They say that hair keeps growing after death, but this living corpse was bald. The wilderness had patted him on the head, and it became an ivory cue ball. The wilderness caressed him and he wasted away. His soul was married to the jungle. He was its spoiled favorite. Was there ivory? Absolutely. Heaps of it, stacks of it. The old mud shack was bursting with it. You would have thought there wasn’t a tusk left anywhere in the country. ‘Mostly fossilized ivory,’ said the manager dismissively. It was no more fossilized than I am, but that’s what they call it when you dig it up. Apparently the natives bury it sometimes, but they couldn’t bury it deep enough to save Mr. Kurtz from his destiny. We filled the steamboat with it and had to pile a lot on the deck. He could see and enjoy it for as long as his eyes worked. He loved it to the end. You should have heard him say, ‘My ivory.’ Oh, I heard him. ‘My Beloved, my ivory, my station, my river, my—’ everything belonged to him. I kept waiting for the jungle to laugh at his arrogance. What difference did it make what belonged to him? What mattered was what he belonged to, what dark powers had taken possession of him. It was terrifying to think about. He was a devil. Literally. You can’t understand. How could you, with solid pavement beneath your feet and neighbors and the police looking out for you? How can you imagine what dark things a man can do living all alone in a primitive place like that, without any civilization around to control him? Those little pieces of civilization like neighbors and policemen, they make all the difference. If you were without them, you’d have to fall back on your own inner strength. Of course, you might be too much of a fool to recognize the dark temptations that would arise. No fool ever sold his soul to the devil. The fool is too foolish or the devil is too devilish to make that deal. I don’t know which. Or maybe you’re just such a wonderful person that you wouldn’t feel such temptations. If so, the earth is just a waiting room for you. But most of us aren’t that way. The earth is a place for us to live in, where we have to put up with terrible sights and sounds and smells and try not to get contaminated by them. This is where your inner strength comes in, your determination to bury those dark feelings deep and focus on some other business. And that’s hard to do. I’m not trying to excuse or explain Mr. Kurtz. I’m trying to make sense of him to myself. He was practically a ghost when we found him, but this ghost spoke to me before he disappeared entirely. This was because he could speak English to me. Kurtz had gone to school in England and that place was still special to him. His mother was half-English, his father was half-French. All of Europe helped make Kurtz. That was appropriate, since the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs had asked him to make a report to help them with their future plans. And he wrote it. I’ve read it. It was incredibly eloquent, but full of anxiety. Seventeen pages of tiny writing! He must have written it before his, um, nerves went wrong and led him to host dances at

midnight in the jungle that ended with human flesh being offered up to him. (Or so I gathered from various sources.) But it was a beautiful piece of writing. In light of what happened later, the opening paragraph seems a little ominous. He began by saying that we whites ‘must seem like supernatural beings to savages, we must look like gods to them,’ and so on. ‘By applying our will, we can do endless good,’ etc. It carried me away, though it’s difficult to remember what exactly it said. I know it gave me the impression of an immense land overseen by gentle and noble rulers. It was exciting, so full of brilliant words. There was no practical advice at all, except for a note on the last page, which he apparently scrawled sometime later, in a shaky hand. It was a very simple method of rule that he proposed, and after reading all of those pages of pure poetry about helping the natives, it was like a terrifying flash of lightning in a clear sky: ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’ He apparently forgot all about that piece of practical advice, because later he asked me to take good care of ‘my pamphlet’ (as he called it), which he was sure would be good for his career. As it turned out, I had to handle his affairs after he died. After everything I’ve done, I should have the right to put his memory in the trashcan of history, but I don’t have a choice in the matter. He won’t be forgotten. Whatever he was, he was not common. He could make his followers do terrible things, and his enemies feel consumed by bitterness. He had one true friend, at least, one person who was neither simple nor selfish. So no, I can’t forget him, even though I don’t think he was worth the life we lost trying to rescue him. I missed the dead helmsman a lot, even while his body was still lying in the cabin. Maybe you think it’s strange to feel that way about a savage, but for months he was a sort of partner to me. I was only aware of our bond after it had been broken. The look he gave me when he was hit with the spear is still in my mind.

“Poor fool! If only he hadn’t opened the shutter. He had no restraint, just like Kurtz. He was like a tree swayed by the wind. After I changed my shoes, I dragged his body out and removed the spear. I carried his body close to mine. Oh, he was so heavy. Then without any fuss I dropped him overboard. The current carried him away like a blade of grass. His body rolled over twice before disappearing forever. All the agents and the manager were on the deck at the time, and some of them thought I was heartless for tossing his body over so quickly. I can’t imagine why they wanted to keep the body hanging around. Maybe they wanted to embalm it. I heard some complaints from below deck as well, from the native woodcutters. Too bad. I had made up my mind that if the helmsman was going to be eaten, it would be by fish, not men. I was worried that his body would be too much temptation to the men on board. Besides, I was anxious to take the wheel since the agent in pajamas was doing a terrible job at it.

“I returned to the wheel as soon as I was finished with the body. We were going right up the middle of the river. I listened to the agents nearby, who were certain that Kurtz was dead and the station burnt to the ground. The redheaded agent was just happy we’d avenged Kurtz by blasting away at the natives on the shore. He practically danced with glee at the ‘glorious slaughter’ we had caused. Of course, he had almost fainted when he saw the helmsman’s body. I couldn’t help saying, ‘You made a glorious amount of smoke, anyway.’ I could see that most of their shots had missed. They’d been shooting from the hip with their eyes shut. I knew that our attackers ran away because of the steam whistle. After I told them this, they forgot about Kurtz and started screaming at me in protest.

“The manager was standing next to me, saying something about how we had to start back down the river before dark, when I saw a building in a clearing on the riverbank. ‘What’s this?’ I asked. He clapped his hands in surprise. ‘The station!’ he cried. I steered the boat toward the shore.

“Through my binoculars I saw a hill that had been cleared of brush. There was a decaying building at the top, with high grass surrounding it and holes in the roof. There was no fence, but apparently there had been one once, since there still were posts in a line in front. They were topped with ornamental carvings, balls of some sort. The rails between the posts had disappeared. The forest surrounded the clearing. On the riverbank was a white man waving his arm like crazy. I was sure I could see human movements in the forest behind him. I sailed past, then cut the engines and let us drift back toward him. The man on shore yelled for us to land. ‘We’ve been attacked,’ screamed the manager. ‘I know, I know. It’s all right,’ the man on the shore cheerfully yelled back. ‘It’s all right. I’m glad.’

“He reminded by of something funny I’d seen once. It took me a second to realize he looked like a clown. His clothes were covered with bright blue, red, and yellow patches. The sunshine made him look like he was dressed for some festive occasion, and it was clear that the patches had been carefully sewn on. He had a very young face, with fair skin and blue eyes. ‘Look out, captain!’ he cried, ‘there’s a snag near here.’ Another snag? I swore terribly. I nearly tore a hole in my already crippled boat. The clown on the riverbank looked up at me. ‘You English?’ he asked, smiling. ‘Are you?’ I shouted from the wheel. He stopped smiling and shook his head apologetically. Then he brightened up. ‘Never mind!’ he cried encouragingly. ‘Are we in time?’ I asked. ‘He’s up there,’ he replied, turning his head toward the hill and looking sad. His face was like the autumn sky, bright one minute and dark the next.

“The manager and the agents gathered up their guns and went up toward the building. The clown got on board. ‘I don’t like this. There are natives in the bush,’ I said. He told me that everything was ok. ‘They’re simple people,’ he said. ‘And I’m glad you came. It took up all of my time keeping them away.’ ‘But you said everything’s ok!’ I said. ‘Oh, they don’t mean any arm,’ he said. I stared hard at him, and he corrected himself: ‘Not really, anyway.’ Then he broke into a smile. ‘Boy, your cabin’s a real mess!’ Then he told me to be ready to blow the whistle in case of trouble. ‘One good screech will work better than all your rifles. They’re simple people.’ He rattled on like this, talking so fast that I felt overwhelmed. It was like he was making up for a long period of silence. ‘Don’t you talk with Mr. Kurtz?’ I said. ‘You don’t talk with that man, you listen to him,’ he said severely. ‘But now—’ He waved his arm and looked depressed. A second later he perked back up, grabbing my hands and shaking them, saying, ‘Brother sailor … honor … pleasure … delight … introduce myself … Russian … son of an arch-priest … Government of Tambov … What? Tobacco! English tobacco! That’s brotherly of you! Smoke? What sailor doesn’t smoke?’

“The pipe seemed to calm him down. He told me how he had run away from school, went to sea on a Russian ship, ran away from that, served on some English ships, and then made up with his father, the arch-priest. He emphasized that part. ‘But when you’re young, you have to see the world for yourself and enlarge your mind,’ he said. ‘Here?’ I asked. ‘You can never tell. This is where I met Mr. Kurtz,’ he replied. I held my tongue. Apparently he convinced a Dutch trading company near the coast to give him some goods to sell in the interior. He didn’t have any plan, and had been wandering around the river for two years, cut off from everybody and everything. ‘I’m not as young as I look. I’m 25,’ he said. ‘At first

the Dutch traders told me to go to hell, but I kept pestering them, so they gave me some cheap things and a few guns and said they hoped to never see me again. I sent them a little ivory a year ago, so they wouldn’t call me a thief when I get back. I hope they got it. Did you find the wood I left for you down the river? That was my old house.’

“I gave him Towson’s book. He looked like he would kiss me, he was so grateful. ‘The only book I had left, and I thought I lost it,’ he said. ‘So many accidents happen to a man wandering around alone. Canoes tip over, and sometimes you have to leave places in a hurry when people get upset.’ He thumbed the pages. ‘You made notes in Russian?’ I asked. He nodded. ‘I thought they were some sort of code,’ I said. He laughed, then suddenly he became serious. ‘It was hard keeping these people away,’ he said, referring to the natives I knew were nearby. ‘Did they try to kill you?’ I asked. ‘Oh, of course not,’ he said. ‘Then why did they attack us?’ I asked. He paused, then said, ‘They don’t want him to go.’ ‘They don’t?’ I said curiously. He nodded mysteriously, spread his arms, and said, ‘That man has enlarged my mind.’

PART 3

“I stared at him, stunned. He looked like a runaway from the circus. His existence was impossible to explain. I couldn’t believe that he had made it so far, that he was still here. ‘I went a little farther into the jungle,’ he said. ‘Then even farther, till I had gone so far that I don’t know how I’ll ever get back. Never mind. I can manage. Take Kurtz away to get help—quickly.’ He still had his youthful liveliness despite his mismatched clothes and ragged, lonely life. For months—for years—his life had been worthless, but there he was, so thoughtlessly and eagerly alive that he seemed indestructible. I had to admire the man, even envy him. Excitement urged him on, excitement kept him safe. He wanted nothing from the wilderness but space to breathe. His only need was to exist and to move onward at the greatest possible risk and with a maximum of hardship. If there was ever a person ruled by an absolutely pure spirit of adventure, it was this ragged youth. I was almost jealous of his passion. It was so intense that even while he was talking to you, you forgot that he really was the person who had gone through these things. I did not envy his devotion to Kurtz, though. He hadn’t thought it through. Rather, he accepted it like fate. I thought his devotion to Kurtz was far and away the most dangerous thing he had come upon so far.

“They drifted together like two ships, and they touched at last. I suppose Kurtz wanted an audience, because once they were alone together in the forest, they had talked all night. Rather, it sounded like Kurtz talked and the Russian listened. ‘We talked about everything,’ he said, losing himself in the memory. ‘I forgot about sleep. The night went by so fast. Everything! Everything! . . . Of love, too.’ ‘Ah, he talked to you about love!’ I said, laughing. ‘It isn’t what you think,’ he cried. ‘It was in general. He made me see things—things.’

“He threw his arms up. We were on deck at the time, and one my crewmembers, lounging near by, looked at him with heavy and glittering eyes. I looked around, and I don’t know why, but I swear that the land, the river, the jungle, and even the sky had never looked so hopeless and so dark.’ And you’ve been with him ever since?’ I said.

“They hadn’t been together the whole time. They hardly saw each other. He had, he said proudly, managed to nurse Kurtz through two illnesses (he made it sound like some risky feat), but as a rule Kurtz wandered alone, deep in the forest. ‘I frequently had to wait for days for him to turn up,’ he said. ‘But it was worth waiting for . . . sometimes.’ ‘Was he exploring?’ I asked. ‘Oh, yes, of course,’ he said. Apparently Kurtz discovered many villages and even one lake, though he couldn’t say where exactly they were. It was dangerous to ask Kurtz too many questions. But mostly his expeditions had been for ivory. ‘But he didn’t have anything to trade for the ivory,’ I objected. ‘There’s a lot of ammunition still left,’ the Russian answered, looking away. ‘So Kurtz raided the country,’ I said. He nodded. ‘By himself?’ He muttered something about the villages round that lake. ‘So Kurtz got the tribe to follow him?’ I suggested. He fidgeted a little. ‘They adored him,’ he said. The tone of these words was so strange that I stared at him, waiting for an explanation. It was amazing how much he wanted to talk about Kurtz but also how afraid he was of the man. Kurtz filled his life, influencing all his feelings and thoughts. ‘What do you expect?’ he burst out. ‘They had never seen guns before. They thought he controlled thunder and lightning. He could be very terrible. You can’t judge Mr. Kurtz by the same standards as you would an ordinary man. No, no, no! Just to give you an idea of his greatness, he threatened to shoot me one day, but I don’t judge him.’ ‘Shoot you! Why?’ I cried. ‘Well, I had a little bit of ivory I got from a chief near my house. The chief gave it to me because I gave his village some meat. Well, Kurtz wanted it and wouldn’t take no for an answer. He said he would shoot me unless I gave him the ivory and left the country. He said he would do it just because he enjoyed it, and there was no one who could stop him from killing whoever he wanted. And it was true, too. I gave him the ivory. What did I care! But I didn’t leave. No, no. I couldn’t leave him. I had to be careful until we were became friends again. That was when he got sick for the second time. Afterward I had to stay away, but I didn’t mind. He spent most of his time in those villages on the lake. When he came down to the river, sometimes he was friendly and sometimes I had to stay out of his way. This man suffered too much. He hated all this, but somehow he couldn’t get away. I begged him to leave while he still could. I offered to go back with him. He would say yes, but then he would go off for weeks looking for ivory. He would forget who he was when he was with the natives.’ ‘So he’s losing his mind,’ I said. The Russian denied this angrily. Mr. Kurtz couldn’t be crazy. If I had heard him talk, just two days ago, I wouldn’t dare say such a thing. . . . I had picked up my binoculars while we talked, and was looking at the shore and the edge of the forest. Knowing that there were people out there, invisible and silent, made me nervous. The jungle gave no sign that this amazing tale the Russian had been struggling to tell was true. The woods were like a mask, revealing nothing. They hid their secrets. The Russian said that Mr. Kurtz had only recently come down to the river, bringing along with him all the warriors from that lake tribe. He had been gone for several months—getting more natives to worship him, I suppose—and had come down unexpectedly. It looked as though Kurtz was planning a raid either across the river or down stream. His appetite for more ivory apparently overwhelmed all his other desires. But then he suddenly fell ill. ‘I heard he was sick, and so I came up—took my chance,’ said the Russian. ‘Oh, he is sick, very sick.’ I looked at the house through my binoculars. Everything was still. The roof was decaying, the long mud wall was peeping above the grass, with three little square windows of different sizes. My binoculars brought all of it close to me. And then I jerked my hand, and one of the fence posts came into focus. You remember I told you that, when I first saw the house from farther away, I had been impressed because it looked like someone had tried to decorate it, despite its obvious decay. Now that I was closer, the sight made my head snap back as if I’d been

punched. I looked carefully at each fence post through my binoculars and realized what they truly were. These round knobs were not mere decorations. They were symbols. They were expressive but mysterious, impressive but disturbing. They were food for thought and also food for vultures if there had been any nearby. In any case they were food for ants, which were busily climbing the poles. They were human heads on stakes. They would have been even more impressive if they had not been turned towards the house. The first head I had seen was the only one facing my way. I was not as shocked as you may think. The snap of my head was just a movement of surprise. I had expected to see a knob of wood there. I slowly moved the binoculars back to the first head. It was black and dried and caving in. Its eyelids were closed so it almost looked like it was sleeping on top of the pole. Its shrunken dry lips were slightly open, revealing a narrow white line of teeth. It was smiling, endlessly amused by the dreams of eternal sleep.

“I’m not revealing any business secrets here. In fact, the manager said later that Mr. Kurtz’s methods had ruined the district. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but there was nothing to be gained financially by putting those heads on sticks. They only showed that Mr. Kurtz had given in to his dark desires and that there was something wrong with him. Despite his powerful speech, there was something missing. I don’t know whether he knew this. I think he realized it right at the end, but only then. The jungle had discovered it early on and had taken its revenge on him for the invasion he was part of. It whispered things to him, things about himself that he didn’t know until he was out there alone. That whisper echoed loudly inside him because he was hollow. I lowered my binoculars. The head that looked close enough to speak to seemed to leap back to where I could no longer reach it.

“Kurtz’s admirer was a little disappointed. He told me that he was afraid to take these ‘symbols’ down. Not afraid of the natives—they wouldn’t move until Kurtz gave the word. They lived all around the station and their chiefs came every day to see Kurtz. They would crawl—‘I don’t want to hear about it,’ I shouted. It was odd, but I felt that hearing details like that would somehow be worse than seeing the heads. The heads were a savage sight, but they seemed like a relief compared to the horror the clown was describing. He looked at me in surprise. It hadn’t occurred to him that I didn’t idolize Mr. Kurtz. He forgot that I hadn’t ever heard any of Kurtz’s splendid speeches about love, justice, how to live a good life, and so on. I didn’t crawl before Kurtz like he did. He said that I didn’t know what the conditions had been like. Those heads were captured rebels. I laughed. Rebels! How would these people be described next? I’d heard them called enemies and criminals and workers, and now these ones were called rebels. They didn’t look very rebellious now. ‘You don’t know how hard life is for someone like Kurtz,’ cried the dying man’s last disciple. ‘Do you?’ I asked. ‘Me? I’m a simple man. I don’t have any great thoughts. I don’t want anything. How can you compare me to…?’ He broke down, overcome by his feelings. ‘I don’t understand,’ he groaned. ‘I’ve been trying to keep him alive. That’s all. I didn’t have anything to do with this. There hasn’t been any medicine for months. He was abandoned. A man like this, with such great ideas. It’s a shame—a shame. I-I haven’t slept for ten nights . . .’

“His voice died out. The shadows had been growing while we talked and now they covered the row of stakes, though we were still in the sunshine. The river glittered behind us. We couldn’t see a living soul on shore. There was no movement anywhere.

“Suddenly a group of men came around the corner of the house. They waded through the high grass, carrying a makeshift stretcher. A shrill cry pierced the air like an arrow shooting into the heart of the land. Streams of naked human beings carrying spears, bows, and shields came pouring into the clearing. The bushes shook and the grass swayed, then everything became still.

“‘If he says the wrong thing to them, we’re all done for,’ said the Russian. The group of men carrying the stretched froze in place. The man on the stretcher sat up and held his skinny arm high. ‘Let’s hope that this man who can talk so well about love in general will find some particular reason to spare our lives,’ I said. I was bitter about the absurd danger of our situation. Being at the mercy of that awful ghostly figure of a man was dishonorable. I couldn’t hear anything, but through my binoculars I could see his jaw moving, his arm waving in command, and his eyes shining in his bony head. Kurtz. Doesn’t ‘Kurtz’ mean ‘short’ in German? His name was as true as everything else in his life. He looked at least seven feet long. His blanket had fallen off and his body looked as pitiful and disgusting as a corpse. I could see his ribcage moving and the bones moving in his arm. It looked like a skeleton carved out of ivory was shaking its hand at men made of bronze. He opened his mouth so wide it looked like he wanted to swallow all the men in front of him and the earth and air as well. I heard the faint sound of a deep voice. He was shouting. He fell back into the stretcher. The men carrying him started toward us again. The crowd of savages disappeared back into the forest as though they were the breath of the jungle being sucked in.

“Some of the agents walked behind the stretcher carrying his guns: two shotguns, a heavy rifle, and a revolver. The manager walked next to Kurtz and was speaking softly to him. Onboard, they laid him down in one of the little cabins on the deck. We had brought letters for him from our station, and they were spread across the bed. His hand moved weakly among the papers. The fire in his eyes and the deliberately relaxed look on his face were striking. He did not seem to be in pain. He looked calm and almost content.

“He touched one of the letters, looked at me, and said, ‘I am glad.’ Someone had been writing to him about me, another special recommendation from Europe. He spoke almost without moving his lips, and the tone and volume of his voice amazed me. It was deep and serious and strong, though he didn’t look like he could even bear to whisper. But he had enough strength left to nearly kill us all, as you’ll soon hear.

“The manager stepped into the doorway. I walked out and he pulled the curtain closed behind me. The agents were watching the Russian, who was staring at the shore. I turned to see what he was looking at.

“Dark human shapes could be made out in the distance, near the border of the forest. Two men, looking like stately warriors in their large headdresses of spotted skins were leaning on spears by the river’s edge. And a gorgeous woman moved from right to left along the shore.

“Her clothes were striped and fringed. She walked proudly and slowly, her jewelry jingling. She held her head high, with her hair done in the shape of a helmet. She wore brass leggings and brass gloves, had a crimson spot on her dark cheek, and wore many necklaces made of glass beads and strange charms. Her jewelry must have been worth several elephant tusks. She was savage and superb, wild and magnificent.

There was something dignified but also frightening about her slow walk along the shore. That whole sad land was silent as the wilderness itself seemed to stop and look at her, like it was seeing its own soul.

“She came next to the boat and stopped, facing us. Her long shadow stopped at the edge of the river. Her face looked wildly sorrowful and fearful but also fierce, like she was struggling with some half-formed thought. She stood still, looking at us. A whole minute passed and then she took a step closer. Her jewelry jingled slightly and she stopped, as if her courage gave out. The man by my side growled and the agents mumbled behind me. She stared at us as if her life depended on it. Suddenly she threw her arms up over her head as though she was trying to touch the sky. Shadows fell across the boat and everything was silent.

“She turned away and walked slowly along the bank and into the bush. We saw her eyes shining back at us through the thicket and then she disappeared.

“‘If she had tried to come aboard I think I would have shot her,’ said the Russian. ‘I’ve been trying to keep her out of the house for the past two weeks. She got in one day and threw a fit about some rags I was using to patch my clothes. She rambled on furiously at Kurtz for an hour, pointing at me now and then. I don’t understand their language here. Fortunately, Kurtz was too sick that day to care. I don’t understand. . . . It’s too much for me. Oh well, it’s all over now.’

“Just then I heard Kurtz’s deep voice inside the cabin. ‘Save me? Save the ivory, you mean. Don’t tell me. Save me! I’ve had to save you. Sick? Sick? Not as sick as you wish. Never mind. I’ll come back and carry out my ideas. I’ll show you what can be done. You with all of your little silly ideas. You’re interfering with me. I’ll return. I . . .’

“The manager came out and took me aside. ‘He is very sick, very sick,’ he said. He pretended to sigh but obviously wasn’t sad. ‘We’ve done everything we could for him, haven’t we? But we can’t deny that Mr. Kurtz has done more harm than good for the Company. He didn’t see that it wasn’t time for action. Caution, that’s my motto. We must be cautious. The district is closed to us for a while. It’s awful. Trade will go down. I can’t deny that there’s a lot of ivory, even if it is mostly fossil. We must save it, in any case. But look how dangerous our position is. And it’s all because his method was unsound.’ I looked at the shore and asked, ‘Did you call it an “unsound method?”’ ‘Without a doubt,’ he said angrily. ‘Don’t you think so?’ ‘It seems like no method at all,’ I said after a while. ‘Exactly,’ he said triumphantly. ‘I knew this would happen. It shows a complete lack of judgment. I’ll have to report it.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘that guy, the brickmaker, he can write a good report for you.’ He looked stunned for a moment. I had never been in such a vile atmosphere. To take my mind off of things, I turned my thoughts to Kurtz. ‘I nevertheless think Mr. Kurtz is a remarkable man,’ I said. He shot me a dark glance and said, quietly, ‘He was,’ before turning away. I was lumped together with Kurtz as a man of unsound methods. But at least I could choose which nightmare I had.

“Kurtz was as good as buried. And for a moment I felt buried too, in a grave of horrors and secrets. I felt a heavy weight on my chest, the weight of corruption and darkness. The Russian tapped me on the shoulder. He mumbled something like, ‘Brother seaman—couldn’t conceal—knowledge of matters that

would affect Mr. Kurtz’s reputation.’ I waited. In his eyes, Kurtz was immortal, not one step from the grave. ‘Well!’ I said at last. ‘Say something. I’m Mr. Kurtz’s friend, in a way.’

“He spoke very formally, saying that he would have kept the matter to himself but we are ‘of the same profession,’ so he could tell me. He was worried that the agents were out to get him. ‘You’re right,’ I said, remembering the conversation I had overheard. ‘The manager thinks you should be hanged.’ ‘I better get away quickly,’ he said. ‘I can’t do anything for Kurtz now and there’s nothing to stop them from killing me. There’s a military post 300 miles from here.’ ‘Then you should go, if you have any friends among the natives who could help you.’ ‘Plenty. They are simple people and I don’t want to take anything from them.’ He stood biting his lip, then continued. ‘I don’t want any harm to happen to these whites here, but I have to think of Mr. Kurtz’s reputation, and since you’re a brother seaman—’ ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Mr. Kurtz’s reputation is safe with me.’ I didn’t realize how true my statement was.

“He lowered his voice and told me that it was Kurtz who ordered the attack on our boat. ‘He hated the idea of being taken away. I don’t understand these things. I’m just a simple man. But he thought it would scare you away and that you would assume he was dead and turn back. I couldn’t stop him. It’s been awful for the past month.’ ‘Well, he’s all right now,’ I said. He urged me to keep his secret. ‘It would be awful for his reputation if anybody here—’ I cut him off by swearing my silence. ‘I have a canoe and three natives waiting not very far from here. I’m leaving. Could you give me a few bullets?’ I gave them to him discreetly. He also took a handful of my tobacco. When he got to the door, he turned and asked, ‘Say, do you have a pair of shoes you could give me?’ He showed me his, which were barely held together with string. I dug out an old pair, which he took gladly. He seemed to think what I’d given him was all he needed for a long journey into the wilderness. ‘I’ll never meet such a man again,’ he said, referring to Kurtz. ‘You should have heard him recite poetry—his own poetry, he told me. Poetry!’ He rolled his eyes joyfully at the memory. ‘Oh, he enlarged my mind!’ I wished him farewell. We shook hands and he vanished in the night. Sometimes I ask myself whether I had ever really seen him, whether it was truly possible to meet such a man.

“When I woke up just after midnight I looked around cautiously, remembering the Russian’s hints of danger. A big fire was burning on the hill, lighting up one corner of the station-house. One of the agents was guarding the ivory with a group of armed natives. From deeper within the forest red gleams shone between the trees where Mr. Kurtz’s native followers were making camp. A repeating drumbeat made the air vibrate, and I could hear the natives chanting through the black wall of the woods. It was like the sound of bees humming inside a hive. I was starting to doze off when a burst of frenzied yelling woke me up. It stopped immediately and the chanting returned. I glanced into the cabin. A light was burning within, but Mr. Kurtz was not there.

“I would have raised an alarm if I had believed my eyes. But I didn’t believe them at first. It seemed so impossible that I was terrified. It was as if something monstrous had been thrust before me for a fraction of a second. Then I became aware of the real, deadly possibility that we would be attacked. This realization was practically a relief compared to my horror at Kurtz’s absence, and so I didn’t raise an alarm.

“There was an agent sleeping in a chair on the deck three feet from me. He had slept through the yells. I let him keep sleeping and leapt ashore. I didn’t betray Mr. Kurtz. I had to be loyal to the nightmare I had chosen. I wanted to deal with him alone, though to this day I don’t know why.

“As soon as I got on the bank I saw a broad trail through the grass. I saw that Kurtz had been crawling, and I knew I would catch him. I walked quickly through the wet grass with clenched fists. I had crazy thoughts of attacking and beating him. I realized how preposterous it was that this situation began with an old woman knitting outside an office in Europe. I imagined the agents firing into the bush, and I imagined myself living out the rest of my days alone in the woods. I confused the beat of the drum with the beat of my heart and was calmed by how regular it sounded.

“I stopped to listen. The night was clear and blue, and in the starlight I thought I saw something moving ahead. I was strangely confident that night. I ran off the trail in a large semicircle, trying to get ahead of the motion that I had seen. It was like Kurtz and I were playing a children’s game.

“I nearly ran him over, but he stood up just in time. He was unsteady on his feet, swaying slightly like a ghost. Many voices murmured in the forest behind me. I realized what a dangerous spot I was in. What would the natives do if he started shouting? Though he could hardly stand, his voice was strong. ‘Go away—hide yourself,’ he said in a deep tone. It was awful. I looked back and saw a man with long black legs and arms and horns on his head moving in front of the fire. He was a sorcerer or something along those lines, wearing antelope horns on his head. ‘Do you know what you’re doing?’ I whispered to Kurtz. ‘Perfectly,’ he said. His voice sounded far away but loud. ‘If he calls out we’re all dead,’ I thought to myself. I couldn’t attack him even if I had wanted to. ‘You’ll be lost,’ I said, ‘completely lost.’ I said the right thing, though he couldn’t possibly be more lost than he was at that moment, when the foundation for our intimacy was being laid.

“‘I had grand plans,’ he muttered. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but if you try to shout, I’ll kill you.’ ‘I was on the verge of great things,’ he said, in a voice that was so sad it made my blood run cold. ‘But now this stupid scoundrel—’ ‘Your reputation in Europe is secure in any case,’ I said. I didn’t want to kill him, you see, and it wouldn’t have served any practical purpose. I tried to break the spell of the wilderness, which held him in its grasp, reminding him of how he had satisfied his monstrous desires. I was convinced that his dark and secret feelings and instincts were what had brought him out to the jungle in the first place, where he could be beyond the rules of society. The terror I felt was not the fear of being killed—though I did feel that too—but the awareness that Kurtz was not a man with whom I could reason, a man who shared any of my values. Like the natives, I could only appeal to his sense of himself and his power. Out here, there was nothing above him or below him—he was the only standard. He had broken free of the earth. Damn him! He had broken the very earth to pieces. He was alone and defenseless but I still didn’t feel on firm ground with him. I’ve been telling you what we said to each other, but what’s the use? We said common, everyday words, the same vague, familiar sounds we make every day. But then and there those words sounded like phrases spoken in nightmares, words that meant much more than they seemed. If anyone ever came face to face with another soul—not a man, but a soul—I did. His mind was clear, even if it was focused exclusively on himself. His soul, however, was mad. Alone in the wilderness, it had looked at itself and what it saw drove it mad. I had to look at it myself, and it felt like I was being

punished for all of my sins. Nothing could destroy one’s faith in humanity as quickly as his soul and the final burst of feeling that came from it. His soul, which had known no restraint, which had been able to give in to all its darkest desires, struggled with itself. It was inconceivable. I walked him back to the boat with his arm wrapped around my neck. He was not much heavier than a child, but it felt like I was carrying half a ton on my back. As I put him down on the cot in the cabin, my legs were shaking.

“When we left the next day at noon, the crowd of natives came out of the woods again. As I turned the boat downstream, 2,000 eyes followed it, watching the river-demon beat the water with its tail and breathe black smoke into the air. Three men wearing horns and covered in bright red mud paced back and forth along the bank. As we passed, they shook black feathers, a mangy skin, and a dried gourd, while making strange noises that sounded nothing like human language. The rest of the crowd murmured along, like participants in some Satanic mass.

“Kurtz was lying on the cot and staring through the open shutter. The woman with all of the jewelry ran out to the river’s edge. She held out her hands and shouted something, and the whole mob started shouting wildly.

“‘Do you understand them?’ I asked Kurtz.

“He stared out the window with a mix of hatred and longing. He smiled strangely and his lips twitched. ‘Do I not?’ he said slowly, gasping as if the words were being torn out of him by some magical force.

“I saw the agents picking up their rifles, so I blew the boat’s whistle, which terrified the natives gathered on shore. ‘Don’t scare them away,’ said one of the agents. I blew the whistle over and over, sending them running into the forest. The three men covered in red mud fell to the ground. Only the woman didn’t flinch. She stretched her bare arms toward us.

“And then the idiots on deck started firing and I couldn’t see anything through the smoke of their rifles.

“The brown current of the river carried us quickly out of the heart of darkness. We sailed back the way we had come at twice the speed. Kurtz’s life was running swiftly too, flowing out of his heart and into the sea of time. The manager was very satisfied with this result. I saw that I would soon be an outcast on my own boat. It’s strange how I accepted this partnership with Kurtz, how I chose this nightmare out of all the others happening there.

“Kurtz’s voice was strong to the end. It was still powerful enough to hide the darkness in his heart. He was struggling with hallucinations of fame and wealth, rambling on about ‘My Intended,’ ‘My station,’ ‘My career,’ ‘My ideas,’ and so on. It was like the ghost of Kurtz as he was in the prime of life was there alongside his body as it wasted away. He loved and hated the dark and primitive emotions he had felt in the jungle, and these feelings warred in his soul.

“Sometimes he was shamefully childish. He wanted kings to meet him on his return. ‘Show them that you have something inside you that is really profitable, and there will be no limits on how your abilities are recognized,’ he said. ‘But you must always have the right motives.’ The monotonous river passed by out the windows. The jungle watched our boat patiently, seeing it as a fragment of another world,

carrying change, conquest, trade, massacres, and blessings. ‘Close the shutter,’ Kurtz said. ‘I can’t bear to look at this.’ I closed it. ‘I’ll wring your heart!’ he cried at the wilderness that he could no longer see.

“Unsurprisingly, the boat broke down and we had to stop at a small island to repair it. This delay shook Kurtz’s confidence. He handed me a packet of papers and a photograph. ‘Keep this for me,’ he said. ‘That fool of a manager will pry into my things when I’m not looking.’ In the afternoon I saw him speaking to himself with his eyes closed, muttering ‘Live rightly, die, die. . . . ’ Was he rehearsing some speech in his sleep, or was it a phrase from some article he had written long ago? He intended to write again someday, ‘to further my ideas. It’s my duty.’

“He looked like a man lying at the bottom of a cliff where the sun never shines. I couldn’t spend too much time with him because I had to work on the engine. I was surrounded by rust, nuts, bolts, hammers, and drills, which I hate. I worked until I shook so badly I couldn’t stand.

“One evening I came into the cabin with a candle and heard him say, ‘I am lying here in the dark waiting for death.’ I forced myself to say, ‘Nonsense.’ I stood over him as if in a trance.

“I was fascinated by the horrible look his face. It was as though a veil had been torn. I saw beneath his ivory skin a mix of pride, power, ruthlessness, terror, and despair. Was he realizing all of the horrible desires he had satisfied during his life? Some sort of vision passed before his eyes and he whispered a cry:

“‘The horror! The horror!’

“I blew out the candle and left the cabin. The agents were in the dining room. I sat across from the manager and ignored his looks. He leaned back and smiled meanly. Flies swarmed around inside, crawling over every surface, including our faces and hands. Suddenly the boy whom the manager kept as a sort of assistant poked his black head in the doorway and said:

“‘Mister Kurtz—he’s dead.’

“Everyone rushed out to see. I stayed behind and ate my dinner. I think they thought I was heartless. I didn’t eat much. There was a lamp in there and it was nice to have a light in that beastly darkness. I didn’t go near Kurtz. His voice was gone. What else had been left of him? Whatever it was, the agents buried it in a muddy hole the next day.

“And then they very nearly buried me.

“But I didn’t join Kurtz. I stayed behind to keep dreaming the nightmare I had chosen, to show my loyalty to Kurtz. It was my destiny! Life is funny. Things happen mysteriously and come to nothing. The most you can hope is that you learn something about yourself. But even that happens too late, when you’re full of regrets. I’ve wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting battle you can imagine. There is no glory, no audience, not even strong feelings. You don’t even believe in yourself or your opponent. If that’s how we get wisdom, life is a harder puzzle than some of us think. I was within a hair’s breath of death and I didn’t have anything to say. This is why I say Kurtz was such a great man. He had something

to say and he said it. He stared at all of life and passed judgment on it and on all the hearts that beat in the darkness: ‘The horror!’ He was a great man. After all, he believed what he said when he judged life. I don’t remember my own feelings. All I remember is how he felt at that moment. Maybe all of life’s wisdom is found in that moment when we step over the edge of life and into death. Maybe. I hope I’ll be able to sum up life with something better than hatred. But his cry of despair was a victory of sorts, a victory of his morals over his life. But it was a victory all the same. That’s why I’ve stayed loyal to Kurtz. I stayed loyal even after hearing a shadow of his eloquence coming from a soul as pure as any you’ll find.

“No, they didn’t bury me. But I can hardly remember what happened on the way back. It was just a hazy journey through a land with no hope. I eventually found myself back in Europe, in the city that looks like a tombstone. I hated the sight of people hurrying through the streets, trying to grind out a little more money and dream their silly dreams. I felt sure they could not possibly know the things about life I had learned. Their behavior, which was simply the normal behavior of people doing normal things, was disgusting to me. It seemed so frivolous and carefree when there was so much danger and darkness in the world. I didn’t want to tell them that, but I could hardly keep myself from laughing in their faces. I suppose I was a little sick at the time. I walked around grinning bitterly at perfectly decent people. My behavior was wrong, but I was sick. My dear aunt tried to ‘nurse up my strength,’ but it wasn’t my strength that needed to get better—it was my mind. I kept the bundle of papers Kurtz gave me. I didn’t know what to do with them, but one day a man in gold-rimmed glasses came to me and asked about ‘certain documents.’ I wasn’t surprised, since I’d fought with the manager about them when we were still out on the river. I had refused to hand over even a scrap, and I refused the man in glasses as well. He started threatening me and said that the Company had a right to any information about its ‘territories.’ And he said that ‘Mr. Kurtz’s knowledge of unexplored regions must have been great.’ I told him that Mr. Kurtz’s knowledge, however great it was, had nothing to do with the Company’s trade. Then he tried to claim that it would be a huge loss to human knowledge and science if Kurtz’s papers weren’t handed over. Finally I offered him Kurtz’s report on the ‘Suppression of Savage Customs’ with the note at the end torn off. He was excited at first but then realized it wasn’t what he wanted and gave it back. ‘This isn’t what we expected,’ he said. ‘Well, don’t expect anything else,’ I replied. ‘There are only personal letters.’ As he left, he threatened some sort of legal action, but I never saw him again. Two days later a man showed up who claimed to be Kurtz’s cousin. He wanted to hear everything about his dear cousin’s final moments. He claimed that Kurtz had been a great musician who could have had a marvelous career. I had no reason to doubt him and to this day I don’t know what Kurtz’s original profession was. I had thought he was a journalist who painted on the side, but even the cousin didn’t really know. We agreed that Kurtz had been a universal genius. I gave him some unimportant letters Kurtz had written to his family. Finally a journalist showed up and wanted to hear about the fate of his ‘dear colleague.’ He told me that Kurtz should have been a politician. He said that Kurtz couldn’t really write, ‘but heavens! How he could talk! He electrified people. He had faith. He could get himself to believe anything. He would have been a great leader of an extreme political party.’ ‘What party?’ I asked. ‘Any party,’ he answered. ‘He was an all-around extremist.’ I agreed. He asked if I knew what had made Kurtz go out there. I gave him the report about the ‘Suppression of Savage Customs’ and told him to publish it if he wanted to. He glanced through it quickly, mumbling the whole time. Then he decided ‘it would do,’ and he took off.

“I was left with a slim packet of letters and the girl’s portrait. She had a beautiful expression. There was a truthfulness and innocence in her face that couldn’t be faked by a painter. I decided I would go and give her the portrait and the letters. I was curious, of course, but there was something else. All that was left of Kurtz was his memory and his ‘Intended,’ and I wanted to give those things up. I wanted to get rid of everything tied to him. That might not have made sense. Maybe I was acting out of loyalty. I don’t know. I can’t tell. But I went.

“I thought his memory would slowly fade away, like other memories of dead people that a man meets in his life. But as I stood outside the tall door of her house, I felt as though he was lying before me, opening his mouth to swallow all of mankind. He was as vivid in death as he was in life. The vision I had of him entered the house with me. I saw him carried on the stretcher in front of the crowd of wild natives who worshipped him. I saw the dark forests and the murky bends of the river, and I heard the beats of the drum like the beating heart of darkness conquering everything. The wilderness won. And the memory of what I had heard him say when we were out in the woods together and those men with horns were pacing in front of the fire—I heard it again. It was so simple and so terrifying. I remember his threats, his vile desires, and the anguish of his soul. And I remembered how later, when we were on the boat, he said casually, ‘This ivory is mine. The Company didn’t pay for it. I collected it myself at great personal risk. What do you think I should do? Fight them? All I want is justice. . . . ’ All he wanted was justice, he said. I rang the bell on a mahogany door on the first floor. While I stood there I thought I could see him staring at me from the glass in the door. He was staring with that wide stare that saw everything, that took in the universe and hated it. I heard his whispered cry, ‘The horror! The horror!’

“I had to wait in a room with high ceilings and three long windows that looked like columns of light as the setting sun shone through them. I could see the bent shapes of the furniture. The marble fireplace was like a cold white monument. There was a grand piano in a corner that looked like a tomb. A high door opened and closed. I stood up.

“She came towards me, all in black, with a pale face. She was in mourning. It had been more than a year since he died, but she looked as though she would mourn forever. She took my hands in hers and said, ‘I heard you were coming.’ She seemed mature, like someone who knew what devotion, belief, and suffering really meant. The room appeared to grow darker in comparison with her pale face, which her hair surrounded like a halo. Her eyes were confident and trustful. She held herself proudly, as if she was the only one who knew how to give Kurtz the mourning he deserved. But as we were shaking hands a look of awful sadness came over her and I realized that Kurtz’s death was still fresh in her mind. Her look was so powerful that for a moment I felt as if he had died yesterday. It was almost as if her sadness and his death were happening at the same time. I saw them together. I heard them together. She said, ‘I have survived,’ and in that moment I heard Kurtz’s final words, his horrible judgment of the world. I asked myself what I was doing there and why I had come to a place of such cruelty and mystery. We sat down and I handed her the packet of Kurtz’s letters. ‘You knew him well,’ she said.

“‘People become close very quickly out there,’ I said. ‘I knew him as well as it is possible for one man to know another.’

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

“‘He was a great man,’ I said. She stared at me like she wanted to hear more, so I went on, ‘It was impossible not to—’

“‘Love him,’ she said quickly. I was so appalled I couldn’t speak. She went on, ‘How true, how true! But no one knew him as well as I did! I knew all his secrets. I knew him best.’

“‘You knew him best,’ I repeated. Maybe she did. But with every word we spoke the room got darker and only her forehead remained lit by belief and love.

“‘You were his friend,’ she said. ‘You must have been, if he gave you this and sent you to me. I feel I can speak to you. I have to speak to you. You heard his last words, so I want you to know that I was worthy of him. I knew him better than anyone on Earth. He told me so himself. And since his mother died I have no one—no one—to—to—’

“I waited in the growing darkness. I wasn’t even sure whether Kurtz had given me the right bundle of letters. I suspect that he wanted me to take care of another batch that I saw the manager looking through after Kurtz’s death. And this girl talked, certain of my sympathy. She talked as thirsty men drink. She told me that her engagement with Kurtz had upset her family. He wasn’t rich enough or something. To tell the truth, Kurtz could have been a beggar for all I knew. He hinted to me once that he left Europe because of his poverty in comparison with this girl.

“‘Everyone who heard him speak became his friend,’ she was saying. ‘He drew men towards him by bringing out the best in them. It is the gift of the great.’ Her voice made me think of all of the other sounds I had heard—the ripple of the river, the trees swaying in the wind, the whisper of Kurtz’s voice as he passed from this life into eternal darkness. ‘But you heard him! You know!’ she cried.

“‘Yes, I know,’ I said. There was despair in my heart, but I had to bow my head to her unshakable faith in Kurtz. She had an illusion that glowed brightly enough to light up any darkness.

“‘What a loss to me—to everyone—to the world,’ she said. Her eyes were glittering with tears, but her tears did not fall.

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

“She stood up and her hair seemed to catch all the remaining light. I rose.

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

“‘We’ll always remember him,’ I said quickly.

“‘No!’ she cried. ‘We cannot let all of his plans come to nothing but sorrow. I didn’t fully understand his plans, but others must have. Something must remain. His words, at least, are still here.’

“‘His words will remain,’ I said.

“‘And his example,’ she whispered to herself. ‘Men looked up to him. His goodness was visible in everything he did. His example—’

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

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

“She reached out as if she was trying to grab someone who was running away. Never see him! I saw him clearly enough then. I’ll see him as long as I live, and I’ll see her tragic figure too. With her outstretched arms she looked like the woman at the riverbank, covered in jewels. She said very quietly, ‘He died as he lived.’

“I felt a dull anger rising up inside me. ‘His death,’ I said, ‘was the one he deserved.’

“‘And I wasn’t with him,’ she said. My anger was replaced by pity.

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

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

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

“‘Forgive me. I—I have mourned so long in silence. You were with him at the end? I think about how lonely he must have been. Nobody near to understand him as I would have. No one to hear—’

“‘I was there,’ I said, shakily. ‘I heard his very last words—’ I stopped, terrified.

“‘Repeat them. I want—I want something—something—to—to live with.’

“I almost screamed at her, ‘Don’t you hear them?’ The dusk was repeating his words in a whisper all around us. I sounded like the first menacing whisper of a rising storm. ‘The horror! The horror!’

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

“I pulled myself together and spoke slowly.

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

“I heard a light sigh and my heart stood still, stopped short by a cry of triumph and pain. ‘I knew it—I was sure!’ She knew. She was sure. I heard her weeping. She hid her face in her hands. I felt like the house would collapse before I could escape. But nothing happened. The heavens do not fall for such a small affair. Would they have fallen if I gave Kurtz the justice he deserved? But I couldn’t. I couldn’t tell her. It would have been too dark—too dark. . . . ’”

Marlow stopped and sat silently in the post of a meditating Buddha. Nobody moved. ‘We’re running late,’ said the Director suddenly. There were too many clouds to see the sea, and the river that led to the ends of the earth looked somber beneath the overcast sky. It seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.