Heart of Darkness Episode 5 to 8

Heart of Darkness

 Heart of Darkness

 

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and served all the men of whom the nation is proud, from
Sir Francis Drake to Sir John Franklin, knights all, titled
and untitled—the great knights-errant of the sea. It had
borne all the ships whose names are like jewels flashing in
the night of time, from the GOLDEN HIND returning
with her rotund flanks full of treasure, to be visited by the
Queen’s Highness and thus pass out of the gigantic tale, to
the EREBUS and TERROR, bound on other
conquests— and that never returned. It had known the
ships and the men. They had sailed from Deptford, from
Greenwich, from Erith— the adventurers and the settlers;
kings’ ships and the ships of men on ‘Change; captains,
admirals, the dark ‘interlopers’ of the Eastern trade, and
the commissioned ‘generals’ of East India fleets. Hunters
for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that
stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers
of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the
sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of
that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! … The
dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of
empires.
The sun set; the dusk fell on the stream, and lights
began to appear along the shore. The Chapman lighthouse,
a three-legged thing erect on a mud-flat, shone


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strongly. Lights of ships moved in the fairway—a great stir
of lights going up and going down. And farther west on
the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was
still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in
sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars.
‘And this also,’ said Marlow suddenly, ‘has been one of
the dark places of the earth.’
He was the only man of us who still ‘followed the sea.’
The worst that could be said of him was that he did not
represent his class. He was a seaman, but he was a
wanderer, too, while most seamen lead, if one may so
express it, a sedentary life. Their minds are of the stay-athome
order, and their home is always with them—the
ship; and so is their country—the sea. One ship is very
much like another, and the sea is always the same. In the
immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the
foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past,
veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful
ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman
unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his
existence and as inscrutable as Destiny. For the rest, after
his hours of work, a casual stroll or a casual spree on shore
suffices to unfold for him the secret of a whole continent,
and generally he finds the secret not worth knowing. The

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yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole
meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut.
But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns
be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was
not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale
which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in
the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are
made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.
His remark did not seem at all surprising. It was just
like Marlow. It was accepted in silence. No one took the
trouble to grunt even; and presently he said, very slow—‘I
was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first
came here, nineteen hundred years ago—the other day….
Light came out of this river since—you say Knights? Yes;
but it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of
lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker—may it last
as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was
here yesterday. Imagine the feelings of a commander of a
fine—what d’ye call ‘em?—trireme in the Mediterranean,
ordered suddenly to the north; run overland across the
Gauls in a hurry; put in charge of one of these craft the
legionaries—a wonderful lot of handy men they must have
been, too—used to build, apparently by the hundred, in a
month or two, if we may believe what we read. Imagine

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him here—the very end of the world, a sea the colour of
lead, a sky the colour of smoke, a kind of ship about as
rigid as a concertina— and going up this river with stores,
or orders, or what you like. Sand-banks, marshes, forests,
savages,—precious little to eat fit for a civilized man,
nothing but Thames water to drink. No Falernian wine
here, no going ashore. Here and there a military camp lost
in a wilderness, like a needle in a bundle of hay—cold,
fog, tempests, disease, exile, and death—death skulking in
the air, in the water, in the bush. They must have been
dying like flies here. Oh, yes—he did it. Did it very well,
too, no doubt, and without thinking much about it either,
except afterwards to brag of what he had gone through in
his time, perhaps. They were men enough to face the
darkness. And perhaps he was cheered by keeping his eye
on a chance of promotion to the fleet at Ravenna by and
by, if he had good friends in Rome and survived the awful
climate. Or think of a decent young citizen in a toga—
perhaps too much dice, you know—coming out here in
the train of some prefect, or tax-gatherer, or trader even,
to mend his fortunes. Land in a swamp, march through
the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the
utter savagery, had closed round him—all that mysterious
life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles,