Authors: Joseph Conrad
"In a few days the Eldorado Expedition went into the patient wilderness,
that closed upon it as the sea closes over a diver. Long afterwards the
news came that all the donkeys were dead. I know nothing as to the fate
of the less valuable animals. They, no doubt, like the rest of us, found
what they deserved. I did not inquire. I was then rather excited at
the prospect of meeting Kurtz very soon. When I say very soon I mean
it comparatively. It was just two months from the day we left the creek
when we came to the bank below Kurtz's station.
"Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings
of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were
kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air
was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of
sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into
the gloom of overshadowed distances. On silvery sand-banks hippos and
alligators sunned themselves side by side. The broadening waters flowed
through a mob of wooded islands; you lost your way on that river as you
would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to
find the channel, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off for
ever from everything you had known once—somewhere—far away—in another
existence perhaps. There were moments when one's past came back to one,
as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare for yourself;
but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered
with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of
plants, and water, and silence. And this stillness of life did not in
the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force
brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful
aspect. I got used to it afterwards; I did not see it any more; I had no
time. I had to keep guessing at the channel; I had to discern, mostly by
inspiration, the signs of hidden banks; I watched for sunken stones; I
was learning to clap my teeth smartly before my heart flew out, when I
shaved by a fluke some infernal sly old snag that would have ripped the
life out of the tin-pot steamboat and drowned all the pilgrims; I had to
keep a lookout for the signs of dead wood we could cut up in the night
for next day's steaming. When you have to attend to things of that sort,
to the mere incidents of the surface, the reality—the reality, I tell
you—fades. The inner truth is hidden—luckily, luckily. But I felt it
all the same; I felt often its mysterious stillness watching me at
my monkey tricks, just as it watches you fellows performing on your
respective tight-ropes for—what is it? half-a-crown a tumble—"
"Try to be civil, Marlow," growled a voice, and I knew there was at
least one listener awake besides myself.
"I beg your pardon. I forgot the heartache which makes up the rest of
the price. And indeed what does the price matter, if the trick be well
done? You do your tricks very well. And I didn't do badly either, since
I managed not to sink that steamboat on my first trip. It's a wonder to
me yet. Imagine a blindfolded man set to drive a van over a bad road.
I sweated and shivered over that business considerably, I can tell
you. After all, for a seaman, to scrape the bottom of the thing that's
supposed to float all the time under his care is the unpardonable sin.
No one may know of it, but you never forget the thump—eh? A blow on the
very heart. You remember it, you dream of it, you wake up at night and
think of it—years after—and go hot and cold all over. I don't pretend
to say that steamboat floated all the time. More than once she had to
wade for a bit, with twenty cannibals splashing around and pushing.
We had enlisted some of these chaps on the way for a crew. Fine
fellows—cannibals—in their place. They were men one could work with,
and I am grateful to them. And, after all, they did not eat each other
before my face: they had brought along a provision of hippo-meat
which went rotten, and made the mystery of the wilderness stink in my
nostrils. Phoo! I can sniff it now. I had the manager on board and three
or four pilgrims with their staves—all complete. Sometimes we came
upon a station close by the bank, clinging to the skirts of the unknown,
and the white men rushing out of a tumble-down hovel, with great
gestures of joy and surprise and welcome, seemed very strange—had the
appearance of being held there captive by a spell. The word ivory would
ring in the air for a while—and on we went again into the silence,
along empty reaches, round the still bends, between the high walls of
our winding way, reverberating in hollow claps the ponderous beat of the
stern-wheel. Trees, trees, millions of trees, massive, immense, running
up high; and at their foot, hugging the bank against the stream, crept
the little begrimed steamboat, like a sluggish beetle crawling on the
floor of a lofty portico. It made you feel very small, very lost, and
yet it was not altogether depressing, that feeling. After all, if you
were small, the grimy beetle crawled on—which was just what you wanted
it to do. Where the pilgrims imagined it crawled to I don't know.
To some place where they expected to get something. I bet! For me it
crawled towards Kurtz—exclusively; but when the steam-pipes started
leaking we crawled very slow. The reaches opened before us and closed
behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar
the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart
of darkness. It was very quiet there. At night sometimes the roll of
drums behind the curtain of trees would run up the river and remain
sustained faintly, as if hovering in the air high over our heads, till
the first break of day. Whether it meant war, peace, or prayer we could
not tell. The dawns were heralded by the descent of a chill stillness;
the wood-cutters slept, their fires burned low; the snapping of a twig
would make you start. Were were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an
earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied
ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance,
to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil. But
suddenly, as we struggled round a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush
walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs,
a mass of hands clapping of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes
rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage. The steamer
toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy.
The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us—who
could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings;
we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane
men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could
not understand because we were too far and could not remember because we
were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone,
leaving hardly a sign—and no memories.
"The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled
form of a conquered monster, but there—there you could look at a thing
monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were
not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—this suspicion
of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and
leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just
the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote
kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly
enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that
there ywas in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible
frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it
which you—you so remote from the night of first ages—could comprehend.
And why not? The mind of man is capable of anything—because everything
is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after
all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valour, rage—who can tell?—but
truth—truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and
shudder—the man knows, and can look on without a wink. But he must at
least be as much of a man as these on the shore. He must meet that truth
with his own true stuff—with his own inborn strength. Principles won't
do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags—rags that would fly off at the
first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief. An appeal to me in
this fiendish row—is there? Very well; I hear; I admit, but I have
a voice, too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be
silenced. Of course, a fool, what with sheer fright and fine sentiments,
is always safe. Who's that grunting? You wonder I didn't go ashore for
a howl and a dance? Well, no—I didn't. Fine sentiments, you say?
Fine sentiments, be hanged! I had no time. I had to mess about with
white-lead and strips of woolen blanket helping to put bandages on
those leaky steam-pipes—I tell you. I had to watch the steering, and
circumvent those snags, and get the tin-pot along by hook or by crook.
There was surface-truth enough in these things to save a wiser man. And
between whiles I had to look after the savage who was fireman. He was
an improved specimen; he could fire up a vertical boiler. He was there
below me, and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a
dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat, walking on his hind-legs.
A few months of training had done for that really fine chap. He squinted
at the steam-gauge and at the water-gauge with an evident effort of
intrepidity—and he had filed teeth, too, the poor devil, and the wool
of his pate shaved into queer patterns, and three ornamental scars
on each of his cheeks. He ought to have been clapping his hands and
stamping his feet on the bank, instead of which he was hard at work, a
thrall to strange witchcraft, full of improving knowledge. He was useful
because he had been instructed; and what he knew was this—that should
the water in that transparent thing disappear, the evil spirit inside
the boiler would get angry through the greatness of his thirst, and take
a terrible vengeance. So he sweated and fired up and watched the glass
fearfully (with an impromptu charm, made of rags, tied to his arm, and
a piece of polished bone, as big as a watch, stuck flatways through his
lower lip), while the wooded banks slipped past us slowly, the short
noise was left behind, the interminable miles of silence—and we crept
on, towards Kurtz. But the snags were thick, the water was treacherous
and shallow, the boiler seemed indeed to have a sulky devil in it, and
thus neither that fireman nor I had any time to peer into our creepy
thoughts.
"Some fifty miles below the Inner Station we came upon a hut of reeds,
an inclined and melancholy pole, with the unrecognizable tatters of
what had been a flag of some sort flying from it, and a neatly stacked
wood-pile. This was unexpected. We came to the bank, and on the stack of
firewood found a flat piece of board with some faded pencil-writing
on it. When deciphered it said: 'Wood for you. Hurry up. Approach
cautiously.' There was a signature, but it was illegible—not
Kurtz—a much longer word. 'Hurry up.' Where? Up the river? 'Approach
cautiously.' We had not done so. But the warning could not have been
meant for the place where it could be only found after approach.
Something was wrong above. But what—and how much? That was the
question. We commented adversely upon the imbecility of that telegraphic
style. The bush around said nothing, and would not let us look very far,
either. A torn curtain of red twill hung in the doorway of the hut, and
flapped sadly in our faces. The dwelling was dismantled; but we could
see a white man had lived there not very long ago. There remained a rude
table—a plank on two posts; a heap of rubbish reposed in a dark corner,
and by the door I picked up a book. It had lost its covers, and the
pages had been thumbed into a state of extremely dirty softness; but the
back had been lovingly stitched afresh with white cotton thread, which
looked clean yet. It was an extraordinary find. Its title was,
An
Inquiry into some Points of Seamanship
, by a man Towser, Towson—some
such name—Master in his Majesty's Navy. The matter looked dreary
reading enough, with illustrative diagrams and repulsive tables of
figures, and the copy was sixty years old. I handled this amazing
antiquity with the greatest possible tenderness, lest it should dissolve
in my hands. Within, Towson or Towser was inquiring earnestly into the
breaking strain of ships' chains and tackle, and other such matters. Not
a very enthralling book; but at the first glance you could see there a
singleness of intention, an honest concern for the right way of going
to work, which made these humble pages, thought out so many years ago,
luminous with another than a professional light. The simple old sailor,
with his talk of chains and purchases, made me forget the jungle and
the pilgrims in a delicious sensation of having come upon something
unmistakably real. Such a book being there was wonderful enough; but
still more astounding were the notes pencilled in the margin, and
plainly referring to the text. I couldn't believe my eyes! They were in
cipher! Yes, it looked like cipher. Fancy a man lugging with him a
book of that description into this nowhere and studying it—and making
notes—in cipher at that! It was an extravagant mystery.
"I had been dimly aware for some time of a worrying noise, and when I
lifted my eyes I saw the wood-pile was gone, and the manager, aided by
all the pilgrims, was shouting at me from the riverside. I slipped the
book into my pocket. I assure you to leave off reading was like tearing
myself away from the shelter of an old and solid friendship.
"I started the lame engine ahead. 'It must be this miserable trader—this
intruder,' exclaimed the manager, looking back malevolently at the place
we had left. 'He must be English,' I said. 'It will not save him from
getting into trouble if he is not careful,' muttered the manager darkly.
I observed with assumed innocence that no man was safe from trouble in
this world.