Heart of Darkness Episode 58 to 61

Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness 

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intense eyes. His aspect was worried, and his head was as
bald as the palm of my hand; but his hair in falling seemed
to have stuck to his chin, and had prospered in the new
locality, for his beard hung down to his waist. He was a
widower with six young children (he had left them in
charge of a sister of his to come out there), and the passion
of his life was pigeon-flying. He was an enthusiast and a
connoisseur. He would rave about pigeons. After work
hours he used sometimes to come over from his hut for a
talk about his children and his pigeons; at work, when he
had to crawl in the mud under the bottom of the
steamboat, he would tie up that beard of his in a kind of
white serviette he brought for the purpose. It had loops to
go over his ears. In the evening he could be seen squatted
on the bank rinsing that wrapper in the creek with great
care, then spreading it solemnly on a bush to dry.
‘I slapped him on the back and shouted, ‘We shall have
rivets!’ He scrambled to his feet exclaiming, ‘No! Rivets!’
as though he couldn’t believe his ears. Then in a low
voice, ‘You … eh?’ I don’t know why we behaved like
lunatics. I put my finger to the side of my nose and
nodded mysteriously. ‘Good for you!’ he cried, snapped
his fingers above his head, lifting one foot. I tried a jig.
We capered on the iron deck. A frightful clatter came out

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of that hulk, and the virgin forest on the other bank of the
creek sent it back in a thundering roll upon the sleeping
station. It must have made some of the pilgrims sit up in
their hovels. A dark figure obscured the lighted doorway
of the manager’s hut, vanished, then, a second or so after,
the doorway itself vanished, too. We stopped, and the
silence driven away by the stamping of our feet flowed
back again from the recesses of the land. The great wall of
vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass of trunks,
branches, leaves, boughs, festoons, motionless in the
moonlight, was like a rioting invasion of soundless life, a
rolling wave of plants, piled up, crested, ready to topple
over the creek, to sweep every little man of us out of his
little existence. And it moved not. A deadened burst of
mighty splashes and snorts reached us from afar, as though
an icthyosaurus had been taking a bath of glitter in the
great river. ‘After all,’ said the boiler-maker in a reasonable
tone, ‘why shouldn’t we get the rivets?’ Why not, indeed!
I did not know of any reason why we shouldn’t. ‘They’ll
come in three weeks,’ I said confidently.
‘But they didn’t. Instead of rivets there came an
invasion, an infliction, a visitation. It came in sections
during the next three weeks, each section headed by a
donkey carrying a white man in new clothes and tan

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shoes, bowing from that elevation right and left to the
impressed pilgrims. A quarrelsome band of footsore sulky
niggers trod on the heels of the donkey; a lot of tents,
camp-stools, tin boxes, white cases, brown bales would be
shot down in the courtyard, and the air of mystery would
deepen a little over the muddle of the station. Five such
instalments came, with their absurd air of disorderly flight
with the loot of innumerable outfit shops and provision
stores, that, one would think, they were lugging, after a
raid, into the wilderness for equitable division. It was an
inextricable mess of things decent in themselves but that
human folly made look like the spoils of thieving.
‘This devoted band called itself the Eldorado Exploring
Expedition, and I believe they were sworn to secrecy.
Their talk, however, was the talk of sordid buccaneers: it
ywas reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity,
and cruel without courage; there was not an atom of
foresight or of serious intention in the whole batch of
them, and they did not seem aware these things are
wanted for the work of the world. To tear treasure out of
the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more
moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars
breaking into a safe. Who paid the expenses of the noble

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enterprise I don’t know; but the uncle of our manager was
leader of that lot.
‘In exterior he resembled a butcher in a poor
neighbourhood, and his eyes had a look of sleepy cunning.
He carried his fat paunch with ostentation on his short
legs, and during the time his gang infested the station
spoke to no one but his nephew. You could see these two
roaming about all day long with their heads close together
in an everlasting confab.
‘I had given up worrying myself about the rivets. One’s
capacity for that kind of folly is more limited than you
would suppose. I said Hang!—and let things slide. I had
plenty of time for meditation, and now and then I would
give some thought to Kurtz. I wasn’t very interested in
him. No. Still, I was curious to see whether this man, who
had come out equipped with moral ideas of some sort,
would climb to the top after all and how he would set
about his work when there.’

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