slightly; I left him to his slumbers and leaped ashore.
I did not betray Mr. Kurtz -- it was ordered I should
never betray him -- it was written I should be loyal to
the nightmare of my choice. I was anxious to deal
with this shadow by myself alone -- and to this day I
don't know why I was so jealous of sharing with any
one the peculiar blackness of that experience.
"As soon as I got on the bank I saw a trail -- a broad
trail through the grass. I remember the exultation
with which I said to myself, 'He can't walk -- he is
crawling on all-fours -- I've got him.' The grass was
wet with dew. I strode rapidly with clenched fists. I
fancy I had some vague notion of falling upon him
and giving him a drubbing. I don't know. I had some
imbecile thoughts. The knitting old woman with the
cat obtruded herself upon my memory as a most im-
proper person to be sitting at the other end of such an
affair. I saw a row of pilgrims squirting lead in the air
out of Winchesters held to the hip. I thought I would
never get back to the steamer, and imagined myself
living alone and unarmed in the woods to an advanced
age. Such silly things -- you know. And I remember I
confounded the beat of the drum with the beating of
my heart, and was pleased at its calm regularity.
"I kept to the track though -- then stopped to listen.
The night was very clear; a dark blue space, sparkling
with dew and starlight, in which black things stood
very still. I thought I could see a kind of motion
ahead of me. I was strangely cocksure of everything
that night. I actually left the track and ran in a wide
semicircle (I verily believe chuckling to myself) so as
to get in front of that stir, of that motion I had seen
-- if indeed I had seen anything. I was circumventing
Kurtz as though it had been a boyish game.
"I came upon him, and, if he had not heard me
coming, I would have fallen over him, too, but he got
up in time. He rose, unsteady, long, pale, indistinct,
like a vapour exhaled by the earth, and swayed
slightly, misty and silent before me; while at my back
the fires loomed between the trees, and the murmur
of many voices issued from the forest. I had cut him
off cleverly; but when actually confronting him I
seemed to come to my senses, I saw the danger in its
right proportion. It was by no means over yet. Sup-
pose he began to shout? Though he could hardly
stand, there was still plenty of vigour in his voice. 'Go
away -- hide yourself,' he said, in that profound tone.
It was very awful. I glanced back. We were within
thirty yards from the nearest fire. A black figure stood
up, strode on long black legs, waving long black arms,
across the glow. It had horns -- antelope horns, I think
-- on its head. Some sorcerer, some witch-man, no
doubt: it looked fiendlike enough. 'Do you know what
you are doing?' I whispered. 'Perfectly,' he answered,
raising his voice for that single word: it sounded to me
far off and yet loud, like a hail through a speaking-
trumpet. 'If he makes a row we are lost,' I thought to
myself. This clearly was not a case for fisticuffs, even
apart from the very natural aversion I had to beat
that Shadow -- this wandering and tormented thing.
'You will be lost,' I said -- 'utterly lost.' One gets
sometimes such a flash of inspiration, you know. I did
say the right thing, though indeed he could not have
been more irretrievably lost than he was at this very
moment, when the foundations of our intimacy were
being laid -- to endure -- to endure -- even to the end --
even beyond.
" 'I had irnmense plans,' he muttered irresolutely.
'Yes,' said I; 'but if you try to shout I'll smash your
head with --' There was not a stick or a stone near.
'I will throttle you for good,' I corrected myself. 'I
was on the threshold of great things,' he pleaded, in a
voice of longing, with a wistfulness of tone that made
my blood run cold. 'And now for this stupid scoun-
drel --' 'Your success in Europe is assured in any
case,' I affirmed steadily, I did not want to have the
throttling of him, you understand -- and indeed it
would have been very little use for any practical pur-
pose. I tried to break the spell -- the heavy, mute spell
of the wilderness -- that seemed to draw him to its
pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and
brutal instincts, by the memory of gratified and mon-
strous passions. This alone, I was convinced, had
driven him out to the edge of the forest, to the bush,
towards the gleam of fires, the throb of drums, the
drone of weird incantations; this alone had beguiled
his unlawful soul beyond the bounds of permitted
aspirations. And, don't you see, the terror of the posi-
tion was not in being knocked on the head -- though I
had a very lively sense of that danger, too -- but in
this, that I had to deal with a being to whom I could
not appeal in the name of anything high or low. I had,
even like the niggers, to invoke him -- himself -- his
own exalted and incredible degradation. There was
nothing either above or below him, and I knew it. He
had kicked himself loose of the earth. Confound the
man! he had kicked the very earth to pieces. He was
alone, and I before him did not know whether I stood
on the ground or floated in the air. I've been telling
you what we said -- repeating the phrases we pro-
nounced -- but what's the good? They were common
everyday words -- the familiar, vague sounds ex-
changed on every waking day of life. But what of
that? They had behind them, to my mind, the terrific
suggestiveness of words heard in dreams, of phrases
spoken in nightmares. Soul! If anybody ever struggled
with a soul, I am the man. And I wasn't arguing with
a lunatic either. Believe me or not, his intelligence was
perfectly clear concentrated, it is true, upon himself
with horrible intensity, yet clear; and therein was my
only chance -- barring, of course, the killing him there
and then, which wasn't so good, on account of un-
avoidable noise. But his soul was mad. Being alone in
the wilderness, it had looked within itself, and, by
heavens! I tell you, it had gone mad. I had -- for my
sins, I suppose -- to go through the ordeal of looking
into it myself. No eloquence could have been so
withering to one's belief in mankind as his final burst
of sincerity. He struggled with himself, too. I saw it --
I heard it. I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul
that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet strug-
gling blindly with itself. I kept my head pretty well;
but when I had him at last stretched on the couch, I
wiped my forehead, while my legs shook under me as
though I had carried half a ton on my back down that
hill. And
yet I had only supported him, his bony arm
clasped round my neck -- and he was not much heavier
than a child.
"When next day we left at noon, the crowd, of
whose presence behind the curtain of trees I had been
acutely conscious all the time, flowed out of the woods
again, filled the clearing, covered the slope with a
mass of naked, breathing, quivering, bronze bodies. I
steamed up a bit, then swung down stream, and two
thousand eyes followed the evolutions of the splash-
ing, thumping, fierce river-demon beating the water
with its terrible tail and breathing black smoke into
the air. In front of the first rank, along the river,
three men, plastered with bright red earth from head
to foot, strutted to and fro restlessly. When we came
abreast again, they faced the river, stamped their feet,
nodded their horned heads, swayed their scarlet bod-
ies; they shook towards the fierce river-demon a
bunch of black feathers, a mangy skin with a pendent
tail -- something that looked like a dried gourd; they
shouted periodically together strings of amazing words
that resembled no sounds of human language; and
the deep murmurs of the crowd, interrupted sud-
denly, were like the responses of some satanic litany.
"We had carried Kurtz into the pilot-house: there
was more air there. Lying on the couch, he stared
through the open shutter. There was an eddy in the
mass of human bodies, and the woman with helmeted
head and tawny cheeks rushed out to the very brink
of the stream. She put out her hands, shouted some-
thing, and all that wild mob took up the shout in a
roaring chorus of articulated, rapid, breathless ut-
terance.
" 'Do you understand this?' I asked.
"He kept on looking out past me with fiery, long-
ing eyes, with a mingled expression of wistfulness and
hate. He made no answer, but I saw a smile, a smile of
indefinable meaning, appearing on his colourless lips
that a moment after twitched convulsively. 'Do I
not?' he said slowly, gasping, as if the words had been
torn out of him by a supernatural power.
"I pulled the string of the whistle, and I did this
because I saw the pilgrims on deck getting out their
rifles with an air of anticipating a jolly lark. At the
sudden screech there was a movement of abject terror
through that wedged mass of bodies. 'Don't! don't you
frighten them away,' cried some one on deck discon-
solately. I pulled the string time after time. They
broke and ran, they leaped, they crouched, they
swerved, they dodged the flying terror of the sound.
The three red chaps had fallen flat, face down on the
shore, as though they had been shot dead. Only the
barbarous and superb woman did not so much as
flinch, and stretched tragically her bare arms after us
over the sombre and glittering river.
"And then that imbecile crowd down on the deck
started their little fun, and I could see nothing more
for smoke.
"The brown current ran swiftly out of the heart of
darkness, bearing us down towards the sea with twice
the speed of our upward progress; and Kurtz's life
was running swiftly, too, ebbing, ebbing out of his
heart into the sea of inexorable time. The manager
was very placid, he had no vital anxieties now, he took
us both in with a comprehensive and satisfied glance:
the 'affair' had come off as well as could be wished. I
saw the time approaching when I would be left alone
of the party of 'unsound method.' The pilgrims
looked upon me with disfavour. I was, so to speak,
numbered with the dead. It is strange how I accepted
this unforeseen partnership, this choice of nightmares
forced upon me in the tenebrous land invaded by
these mean and greedy phantoms.
"Kurtz discoursed. A voice! a voice! It rang deep to
the very last. It survived his strength to hide in the
magnificent folds of eloquence the barren darkness of
his heart. Oh, he struggled! he struggled! The wastes
of his weary brain were haunted by shadowy images
now -- images of wealth and fame revolving obse-
quiously round his unextinguishable gift of noble and
lofty expression. My Intended, my station, my career,
my ideas -- these were the subjects for the occasional
utterances of elevated sentiments. The shade of the
original Kurtz frequented the bedside of the hollow
sham, whose fate it was to be buried presently in the
mould of primeval earth. But both the diabolic love
and the unearthly hate of the mysteries it had pene-
trated fought for the possession of that soul satiated
with primitive emotions, avid of lying fame, of sham
distinction, of all the appearances of success and power.
"Sometimes he was contemptibly childish. He de-
sired to have kings meet him at railway-stations on his
return from some ghastly Nowhere, where he in-
tended to accomplish great things. 'You show them
you have in you something that is really profitable,
and then there will be no limits to the recognition of
your ability,' he would say. 'Of course you must take
care of the motives -- right motives -- always.' The
long reaches that were like one and the same reach,
monotonous bends that were exactly alike, slipped
past the steamer with their multitude of secular trees
looking patiently after this grimy fragment of an-
other world, the forerunner of change, of conquest,
of trade, of massacres, of blessings. I looked ahead --
piloting. 'Close the shutter,' said Kurtz suddenly one
day; 'I can't bear to look at this.' I did so. There was
a silence. 'Oh, but I will wring your heart yet!' he
cried at the invisible wilderness.
"We broke down -- as I had expected -- and had to
lie up for repairs at the head of an island. This delay
was the first thing that shook Kurtz's confidence. One
morning he gave me a packet of papers and a photo-
graph -- the lot tied together with a shoe-string. 'Keep
this for me,' he said. 'This noxious fool' (meaning the
manager) 'is capable of prying into my boxes when I
am not looking.' In the afternoon I saw him. He was
lying on his back with closed eyes, and I withdrew
quietly, but I heard him mutter, 'Live rightly, die, die
. .' I listened. There was nothing more. Was he
rehearsing some speech in his sleep, or was it a frag-
ment of a phrase from some newspaper article? He
had been writing for the papers and meant to do so
again, 'for the furthering of my ideas. It's a duty.'
"His was an impenetrable darkness. I looked at him
as you peer down at a man who is lying at the bottom
of a precipice where the sun never shines. But I had
not much time to give him, because I was helping the
engine-driver to take to pieces the leaky cylinders, to
straighten a bent conn
ecting-rod, and in other such
matters. I lived in an infernal mess of rust, filings,
nuts, bolts, spanners, hammers, ratchet drills -- things
I abominate, because I don't get on with them. I
tended the little forge we fortunately had aboard; I
toiled wearily in a wretched scrap-heap -- unless I had
the shakes too bad to stand.
"One evening coming in with a candle I was star-
tled to hear him say a little tremulously, 'I am lying
here in the dark waiting for death.' The light was
within a foot of his eyes. I forced myself to murmur,
'Oh, nonsense!' and stood over him as if transfixed.
"Anything approaching the change that came over
his features I have never seen before, and hope never
to see again. Oh, I wasn't touched. I was fascinated.
It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that
ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless
power, of craven terror -- of an intense and hopeless
despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of
desire, temptation, and surrender during that su-
preme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in
a whisper at some image, at some vision -- he cried out
twice, a cry that was no more than a breath:
" 'The horror! The horror!'
"I blew the candle out and left the cabin. The pil-
grims were dining in the mess-room, and I took my
place opposite the manager, who lifted his eyes to
give me a questioning glance, which I successfully ig-
nored. He leaned back, serene, with that peculiar
smile of his sealing the unexpressed depths of his
meanness. A continuous shower of small flies streamed
upon the lamp, upon the cloth, upon our hands and
faces. Suddenly the manager's boy put his insolent
black head in the doorway, and said in a tone of scath-
ing contempt:
" 'Mistah Kurtz -- he dead.'
"All the pilgrims rushed out to see. I remained,
and went on with my dinner. I believe that I was con-
sidered brutally callous. However, I did not eat much.
There was a lamp in there -- light, don't you know --
and outside it was so beastly, beastly dark. I went no
more near the remarkable man who had pronounced
a judgment upon the adventures of his soul on this
earth. The voice was gone. What else had been there?
But I am of course aware that next day the pilgrims
buried something in a muddy hole.
"And then they very nearly buried me.
"However, as you see, I did not go to join Kurtz
there and then. I did not. I remained to dream the
nightmare out to the end, and to show my loyalty to
Kurtz once more. Destiny. My destiny! Droll thing
life is -- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic
for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it
is some knowledge of yourself -- that comes too late --
a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled
with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can
imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness,
with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without
spectators, without clamour, without glory, without
the great desire of victory, without the great fear of
defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism,
without much belief in your own right, and still less
in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ulti-
mate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some
of us think it to be. I was within a hair's breadth of the
last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with
humiliation that probably I would have nothing to
say. This is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz was a
remarkable man. He had something to say. He said
it. Since I had peeped over the edge myself, I under-
stand better the meaning of his stare, that could not
see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to
embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to pene-
trate all the hearts that beat in the darkness. He had
summed up -- he had judged. 'The horror!' He was a
remarkable man. After all, this was the expression of
some sort of belief; it had candour, it had conviction,
it had a vibrating note of revolt in its whisper, it had
the appalling face of a glimpsed truth -- the strange
commingling of desire and hate. And it is not my own
extremity I remember best -- a vision of greyness with-
out form filled with physical pain, and a careless con-
tempt for the evanescence of all things -- even of this
pain itself. No! It is his extremity that I seem to have
lived through. True, he had made that last stride, he
had stepped over the edge, while I had been permit-
Heart of Darkness Page 11
