Heart of Darkness
A sailor's journey up a river in Africa, in search of a man who has lost his soul
Page 1
The sun set over the wide mouth of the River Thames. On the cruising boat Nellie, the sailor Marlow began to speak. 'And this also,' he said quietly, 'has been one of the dark places of the earth.' He gestured toward the distant shore where London's lights began to glow. 'I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here,' he clarified. 'Imagine a young commander of a trireme, coming up this river. The savagery, the utter savagery... he has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible.' He fell silent for a moment, his gaze fixed on the darkening water. Then, his voice low, he began his own story of a different river, and a journey into a different kind of darkness.
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Marlow recalled visiting the Company’s headquarters in a city that felt like a tomb. After a brief meeting, he was sent to a doctor. 'I always ask leave to do this,' the doctor explained, tapping a pair of calipers. 'It's for science, you see.' He measured Marlow's head, then asked a strange question. 'Ever any madness in your family?' Marlow replied, 'I believe not.' The doctor nodded, satisfied. 'It would be interesting,' he said, making a note in his book, 'to watch the mental changes of individuals on the spot, out there.' With that ominous farewell and his contract signed, Marlow left the office, feeling as though he was setting off for the centre of the earth.
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The station on the coast was a place of chaos. 'I've seen the devil of violence, and the devil of greed,' Marlow told his listeners, 'but this was a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly.' He saw a line of local men in chains, forced to carry heavy baskets. Seeking shade, he found a grove of sorrow where overworked labourers had been left to lie on the ground. 'They were not enemies,' he said grimly, 'they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now.' He stooped and offered one young man a ship's biscuit from his pocket. 'I found nothing else to do,' he admitted. 'He made a movement of his eyes, but that was all.'
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Marlow began the two-hundred-mile trek inland. The silence of the forest was an immense, living force. 'The stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace,' he explained to his audience. 'It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention.' He was travelling with a sick Company agent who had to be carried in a hammock and complained constantly. One day, the man asked him, 'Are you going to Kurtz?' Marlow confirmed that he was. 'He is a prodigy,' the man declared with sudden energy. 'He is an emissary of pity and science and progress, and devil knows what else.' Even here, the name Kurtz was on everyone's lips.
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Marlow arrived at the Central Station to find his steamboat half-sunk at the river's edge. The Station Manager, a man with cold, hollow eyes, came to meet him. 'She sank just two days ago,' the manager said with a strange, faint smile. 'A regrettable accident.' Marlow knew it was deliberate. 'How did it happen?' he asked, keeping his voice level as he surveyed the damage. 'Tore the bottom out on some rocks,' the manager replied breezily. 'The captain was a stupid fellow. Now you'll have to wait here.' For months, Marlow worked to repair the boat, hearing constant whispers about Kurtz. 'He is a prodigy,' the manager told him one day, his smile never wavering. 'He sends in more ivory than all the others put together.'
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At last, the steamboat was ready. The journey upriver was like a voyage to the beginning of the world. 'The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish,' Marlow recalled. 'And the silence was not peace. It was a thing with a face of its own.' At night, they would hear drums. His crew, he learned, were cannibals, but they were good workers. 'They were men one could work with,' he noted. 'And in the end, they showed more restraint than I would have thought possible.' One afternoon he saw a deserted hut with a sign that read: 'Wood for you. Hurry up. Approach cautiously.' Inside was a tattered book on seamanship. He took it with him, a strange, friendly voice from the wilderness.
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A thick fog enveloped the boat, and when it lifted, a volley of arrows rained down from the trees. The helmsman opened the pilothouse shutter to fire back and was struck by a long spear. He fell at Marlow's feet. 'He had no restraint, that man,' Marlow thought grimly, his hands tight on the wheel. 'No restraint at all. That's what made the difference.' With the dying man collapsed against him, he reached up for the steam-whistle cord. 'The pilgrims on board were firing their rifles uselessly into the bush,' he recalled. 'I had to do something.' He pulled the string. 'The shriek that followed was something awful,' he said, 'and I did not let go. I let it scream and scream until the attack stopped.'
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A young Russian trader, dressed in colourful patches, ran to meet them. 'You don't talk with Mr. Kurtz,' he said breathlessly, his face alight with devotion. 'You listen to him. He has enlarged my mind!' When Marlow asked about the attack, the Russian was defensive. 'He has been very ill,' he insisted. 'But these people adore him. They don't want him to go.' Marlow then raised his binoculars to look at the posts around the station house, and felt a cold shock as he saw what was on them. He lowered the glasses, his face frozen. The Russian saw his expression and stepped closer. 'Rebels!' he declared nervously, pointing a shaky finger. 'Those are the heads of rebels!'
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Marlow brought the dying Kurtz aboard the steamboat. In his lucid moments, Kurtz's voice was still astonishingly powerful. 'You are looking at a man who has had kings come to him,' he would declare. He entrusted a bundle of papers to Marlow. 'You will judge me,' he said, his eyes burning with fever. 'You are a man of judgement.' One afternoon, he was suddenly calm. 'I am lying here in the dark waiting for death,' he stated. As evening fell and the light in the cabin faded, Kurtz stared intently at something only he could see. He struggled to speak, then whispered, his voice a breath of air, 'The horror! The horror!' And then, he was gone.
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Back on the Nellie, Marlow's voice ceased. He had told us how he returned to the city and met Kurtz's Intended. 'She was in mourning,' he said, 'and her faith in him was something beautiful and terrible. She wanted to know his last words.' In her dimly lit drawing-room, she had looked at him with trusting eyes. 'His last word,' she prompted, her voice trembling, 'tell me.' Marlow paused in his telling. 'I could not tell her the truth,' he confessed to us on the boat. 'It would have been too dark—too dark altogether.' And so he had lied. 'The last word he pronounced,' he told her, 'was your name.' On the deck of the yawl, we all sat in silence, the tale finished. The river flowed on into the heart of an immense darkness.
About this story
- Audience: general readers
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