Heart of Darkness 3 Episode 124 to 130

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was as true as everything else in his life— and death. He
looked at least seven feet long. His covering had fallen off,
and his body emerged from it pitiful and appalling as from
a winding-sheet. I could see the cage of his ribs all astir,
the bones of his arm waving. It was as though an animated
image of death carved out of old ivory had been shaking
its hand with menaces at a motionless crowd of men made
of dark and glittering bronze. I saw him open his mouth
wide—it gave him a weirdly voracious aspect, as though
he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the
men before him. A deep voice reached me faintly. He
must have been shouting. He fell back suddenly. The
stretcher shook as the bearers staggered forward again, and
almost at the same time I noticed that the crowd of savages
was vanishing without any perceptible movement of
retreat, as if the forest that had ejected these beings so
suddenly had drawn them in again as the breath is drawn
in a long aspiration.
‘Some of the pilgrims behind the stretcher carried his
arms— two shot-guns, a heavy rifle, and a light revolvercarbine—
the thunderbolts of that pitiful Jupiter. The
manager bent over him murmuring as he walked beside
his head. They laid him down in one of the little cabins—
just a room for a bed place and a camp-stool or two, you

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know. We had brought his belated correspondence, and a
lot of torn envelopes and open letters littered his bed. His
hand roamed feebly amongst these papers. I was struck by
the fire of his eyes and the composed languor of his
expression. It was not so much the exhaustion of disease.
He did not seem in pain. This shadow looked satiated and
calm, as though for the moment it had had its fill of all the
emotions.
‘He rustled one of the letters, and looking straight in
my face said, ‘I am glad.’ Somebody had been writing to
him about me. These special recommendations were
turning up again. The volume of tone he emitted without
effort, almost without the trouble of moving his lips,
amazed me. A voice! a voice! It was grave, profound,
vibrating, while the man did not seem capable of a
whisper. However, he had enough strength in him—
factitious no doubt—to very nearly make an end of us, as
you shall hear directly.
‘The manager appeared silently in the doorway; I
stepped out at once and he drew the curtain after me. The
Russian, eyed curiously by the pilgrims, was staring at the
shore. I followed the direction of his glance.
‘Dark human shapes could be made out in the distance,
flitting indistinctly against the gloomy border of the forest,

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and near the river two bronze figures, leaning on tall
spears, stood in the sunlight under fantastic head-dresses of
spotted skins, warlike and still in statuesque repose. And
from right to left along the lighted shore moved a wild
and gorgeous apparition of a woman.
‘She walked with measured steps, draped in striped and
fringed cloths, treading the earth proudly, with a slight
jingle and flash of barbarous ornaments. She carried her
head high; her hair was done in the shape of a helmet; she
had brass leggings to the knee, brass wire gauntlets to the
elbow, a crimson spot on her tawny cheek, innumerable
necklaces of glass beads on her neck; bizarre things,
charms, gifts of witch-men, that hung about her, glittered
and trembled at every step. She must have had the value of
several elephant tusks upon her. She was savage and
superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something
ominous and stately in her deliberate progress. And in the
hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful
land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the
fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive,
as though it had been looking at the image of its own
tenebrous and passionate soul.
‘She came abreast of the steamer, stood still, and faced
us. Her long shadow fell to the water’s edge. Her face had

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a tragic and fierce aspect of wild sorrow and of dumb pain
mingled with the fear of some struggling, half-shaped
resolve. She stood looking at us without a stir, and like the
wilderness itself, with an air of brooding over an
inscrutable purpose. A whole minute passed, and then she
made a step forward. There was a low jingle, a glint of
yellow metal, a sway of fringed draperies, and she stopped
as if her heart had failed her. The young fellow by my side
growled. The pilgrims murmured at my back. She looked
at us all as if her life had depended upon the unswerving
steadiness of her glance. Suddenly she opened her bared
arms and threw them up rigid above her head, as though
in an uncontrollable desire to touch the sky, and at the
same time the swift shadows darted out on the earth,
swept around on the river, gathering the steamer into a
shadowy embrace. A formidable silence hung over the
scene.
‘She turned away slowly, walked on, following the
bank, and passed into the bushes to the left. Once only her
eyes gleamed back at us in the dusk of the thickets before
she disappeared.
‘‘If she had offered to come aboard I really think I
would have tried to shoot her,’ said the man of patches,
nervously. ‘I have been risking my life every day for the

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last fortnight to keep her out of the house. She got in one
day and kicked up a row about those miserable rags I
picked up in the storeroom to mend my clothes with. I
wasn’t decent. At least it must have been that, for she
talked like a fury to Kurtz for an hour, pointing at me
now and then. I don’t understand the dialect of this tribe.
Luckily for me, I fancy Kurtz felt too ill that day to care,
or there would have been mischief. I don’t understand….
No—it’s too much for me. Ah, well, it’s all over now.’
‘At this moment I heard Kurtz’s deep voice behind the
curtain: ‘Save me!—save the ivory, you mean. Don’t tell
me. Save ME! Why, I’ve had to save you. You are
interrupting my plans now. Sick! Sick! Not so sick as you
would like to believe. Never mind. I’ll carry my ideas out
yet—I will return. I’ll show you what can be done. You
with your little peddling notions—you are interfering with
me. I will return. I….’
‘The manager came out. He did me the honour to take
me under the arm and lead me aside. ‘He is very low, very
low,’ he said. He considered it necessary to sigh, but
neglected to be consistently sorrowful. ‘We have done all
we could for him—haven’t we? But there is no disguising
the fact, Mr. Kurtz has done more harm than good to the
Company. He did not see the time was not ripe for

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vigorous action. Cautiously, cautiously—that’s my
principle. We must be cautious yet. The district is closed
to us for a time. Deplorable! Upon the whole, the trade
will suffer. I don’t deny there is a remarkable quantity of
ivory—mostly fossil. We must save it, at all events—but
look how precarious the position is—and why? Because
the method is unsound.’ ‘Do you,’ said I, looking at the
shore, ‘call it ‘unsound method?‘‘ ‘Without doubt,’ he
exclaimed hotly. ‘Don’t you?’ … ‘No method at all,’ I
murmured after a while. ‘Exactly,’ he exulted. ‘I
anticipated this. Shows a complete want of judgment. It is
my duty to point it out in the proper quarter.’ ‘Oh,’ said I,
‘that fellow—what’s his name?—the brickmaker, will
make a readable report for you.’ He appeared confounded
for a moment. It seemed to me I had never breathed an
atmosphere so vile, and I turned mentally to Kurtz for
relief—positively for relief. ‘Nevertheless I think Mr.
Kurtz is a remarkable man,’ I said with emphasis. He
started, dropped on me a heavy glance, said very quietly,
‘he WAS,’ and turned his back on me. My hour of favour
was over; I found myself lumped along with Kurtz as a
partisan of methods for which the time was not ripe: I was
unsound! Ah! but it was something to have at least a
choice of nightmares.

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‘I had turned to the wilderness really, not to Mr. Kurtz,
who, I was ready to admit, was as good as buried. And for
a moment it seemed to me as if I also were buried in a vast
grave full of unspeakable secrets. I felt an intolerable
weight oppressing my breast, the smell of the damp earth,
the unseen presence of victorious corruption, the darkness
of an impenetrable night…. The Russian tapped me on
the shoulder. I heard him mumbling and stammering
something about ‘brother seaman—couldn’t conceal—
knowledge of matters that would affect Mr. Kurtz’s
reputation.’ I waited. For him evidently Mr. Kurtz was
not in his grave; I suspect that for him Mr. Kurtz was one
of the immortals. ‘Well!’ said I at last, ‘speak out. As it
happens, I am Mr. Kurtz’s friend—in a way.’
‘He stated with a good deal of formality that had we
not been ‘of the same profession,’ he would have kept the
matter to himself without regard to consequences. ‘He
suspected there was an active ill-will towards him on the
part of these white men that—’ ‘You are right,’ I said,
remembering a certain conversation I had overheard. ‘The
manager thinks you ought to be hanged.’ He showed a
concern at this intelligence which amused me at first. ‘I
had better get out of the way quietly,’ he said earnestly. ‘I
can do no more for Kurtz now, and they would soon find