Heart of Darkness 3 Episode 144 to 150

Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness

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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 fragment 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
connecting-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 startled 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

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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 supreme 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 pilgrims
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 ignored. 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 scathing contempt:
‘‘Mistah Kurtz—he dead.’
‘All the pilgrims rushed out to see. I remained, and
went on with my dinner. I believe I was considered
brutally callous. However, I did not eat much. There was

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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 ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater

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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 understand
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 penetrate 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 without form filled with physical pain, and a
careless contempt 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 permitted to
draw back my hesitating foot. And perhaps in this is the
whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth,
and all sincerity, are just compressed into that

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inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the
threshold of the invisible. Perhaps! I like to think my
summing-up would not have been a word of careless
contempt. Better his cry—much better. It was an
affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable
defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions.
But it was a victory! That is why I have remained loyal to
Kurtz to the last, and even beyond, when a long time after
I heard once more, not his own voice, but the echo of his
magnificent eloquence thrown to me from a soul as
translucently pure as a cliff of crystal.
‘No, they did not bury me, though there is a period of
time which I remember mistily, with a shuddering
wonder, like a passage through some inconceivable world
that had no hope in it and no desire. I found myself back
in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people
hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from
each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp
their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and
silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They
were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an
irritating pretence, because I felt so sure they could not
possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, which
was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going

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about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was
offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in
the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend. I had no
particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some
difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces
so full of stupid importance. I dareway I was not very well
at that time. I tottered about the streets—there were
various affairs to settle—grinning bitterly at perfectly
respectable persons. I admit my behaviour was
inexcusable, but then my temperature was seldom normal
in these days. My dear aunt’s endeavours to ‘nurse up my
strength’ seemed altogether beside the mark. It was not
my strength that wanted nursing, it was my imagination
that wanted soothing. I kept the bundle of papers given
me by Kurtz, not knowing exactly what to do with it. His
mother had died lately, watched over, as I was told, by his
Intended. A clean-shaved man, with an official manner
and wearing gold-rimmed spectacles, called on me one
day and made inquiries, at first circuitous, afterwards
suavely pressing, about what he was pleased to denominate
certain ‘documents.’ I was not surprised, because I had had
two rows with the manager on the subject out there. I had
refused to give up the smallest scrap out of that package,
and I took the same attitude with the spectacled man. He

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became darkly menacing at last, and with much heat
argued that the Company had the right to every bit of
information about its ‘territories.’ And said he, ‘Mr.
Kurtz’s knowledge of unexplored regions must have been
necessarily extensive and peculiar— owing to his great
abilities and to the deplorable circumstances in which he
had been placed: therefore—’ I assured him Mr. Kurtz’s
knowledge, however extensive, did not bear upon the
problems of commerce or administration. He invoked
then the name of science. ‘It would be an incalculable loss
if,’ etc., etc. I offered him the report on the ‘Suppression
of Savage Customs,’ with the postscriptum torn off. He
took it up eagerly, but ended by sniffing at it with an air of
contempt. ‘This is not what we had a right to expect,’ he
remarked. ‘Expect nothing else,’ I said. ‘There are only
private letters.’ He withdrew upon some threat of legal
proceedings, and I saw him no more; but another fellow,
calling himself Kurtz’s cousin, appeared two days later, and
was anxious to hear all the details about his dear relative’s
last moments. Incidentally he gave me to understand that
Kurtz had been essentially a great musician. ‘There was the
making of an immense success,’ said the man, who was an
organist, I believe, with lank grey hair flowing over a
greasy coat-collar. I had no reason to doubt his statement;