On the Nellie, held at anchor on the Thames until the tide turns, Marlow tells the men around him that this river was a dark place once. He puts a Roman officer in the fog and the mud, with Thames water to drink and a hope of promotion if he survives. Then he offers the defence his own time prefers. What saves us, he says, is efficiency, the devotion to efficiency. Conquest is mostly the taking of the earth from people who look different, and it is not a pretty thing if you look at it too long. An idea at the back of it, not a sentimental pretence, is the only redemption he will allow. Nobody on the yacht interrupts. They are waiting out the flood, and they are about to hear what that idea did when Marlow went to work for it.
He wanted the work because a map in a shop window showed one river as a snake, and the snake charmed him. A captain named Fresleven had just been killed in a quarrel over two hens, so the Company needed another man, and Marlow's aunt knew a wife in the Administration. In the city he thinks of as a whited sepulchre, two women knit black wool in the outer room. One leads the newcomers in. The other looks over her spectacles as if she already knows which of them will not see her again. A doctor measures Marlow's skull and asks whether there is madness in the family. He does not expect to examine the men who come back. The changes, he says, take place inside. Marlow's aunt has told her friends that her nephew is an emissary of light, sent to wean millions from their ways. He says the Company is run for profit. She answers that the labourer is worthy of his hire. He leaves feeling like an impostor, as if the trip were to the centre of the earth.
The coast does not turn into a country. Soldiers and custom-house clerks are put ashore and left. A French warship fires into the bush, and the shells change nothing. At the Outer Station a boiler lies in the grass, a railway truck sits on its back, and men blast a cliff that is not in the way. Six men in a chain carry baskets of earth. They are called criminals. Under the trees, people who have been worked until they are useless are dying in the shade, free to crawl away because they are no longer worth feeding. Drainage pipes lie smashed in a ravine. A hole has been dug on the hillside for no reason he can find. The one white man who still looks finished is the chief accountant: starched collar, books in apple-pie order, irritated when a dying agent's groans threaten a clerical error. Fifty feet below the office door, the tops of that grove are still in sight. From this man Marlow first hears the name Kurtz. A first-class agent, a very remarkable person, and the man a council in Europe means to raise. Tell him, the accountant says, that everything here is very satisfactory.
After two hundred miles on foot, Marlow reaches the Central Station and finds his steamer on the bottom of the river. The manager, ordinary in every way except that he is never ill, estimates three months before they can start, and the estimate will prove exact. The agents inside a rotten fence carry long staves and speak the word ivory as if they were praying to it. A shed of trade cloth burns. A man is beaten for the fire and later walks off into the bush. The young agent who is supposed to make bricks has made none in more than a year, and he spends an evening trying to learn whom Marlow knows in the sepulchral city. On his wall is a picture Kurtz painted while waiting: a blindfolded woman carrying a lighted torch. Marlow hates a lie. He tells the listeners it has a flavour of mortality. He still lets the brickmaker believe that powerful people in Europe sent him, because Kurtz is only a word so far, and a word might be helped by the pretence. What he wants in fact is rivets. Cases of them sit on the coast. None arrive. He and the boiler-maker dance on the iron deck when they think the rivets are coming, and the forest sends the clatter back, then goes still. In place of rivets comes the Eldorado Exploring Expedition, led by the manager's uncle, a party that talks like burglars breaking a safe. Marlow stops waiting for the repair. He is left wondering how a man who came out with moral ideas will do his work when nothing outside him can make him stop.
