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Heart of Darkness

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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 immense 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 scoundrel—’ ‘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 purpose. 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 monstrous 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


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permitted aspirations. And, don’t you see, the terror of the
position 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 pronounced—but what’s the good? They were
common everyday words—the familiar, vague sounds
exchanged 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 unavoidable noise. But his


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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 struggling 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 splashing, thumping, fierce riverdemon
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


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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 bodies; they shook towards the fierce riverdemon
a bunch of black feathers, a mangy skin with a
pendent tail—something that looked 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 suddenly, 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 something, and all that wild mob
took up the shout in a roaring chorus of articulated, rapid,
breathless utterance.
‘‘Do you understand this?’ I asked.
‘He kept on looking out past me with fiery, longing
eyes, with a mingled expression of wistfulness and hate.
He made no answer, but I saw a smile, a smile of
indefinable meaning, appear on his colourless lips that a
moment after twitched convulsively. ‘Do I not?’ he said


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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 disconsolately. 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


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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 obsequiously 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
penetrated 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.

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‘Sometimes he was contemptibly childish. He desired
to have kings meet him at railway-stations on his return
from some ghastly Nowhere, where he intended 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 another
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 photograph— 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