Heart of Darkness

Lying on his steamboat deck, Marlow overhears the manager and his nephew conspiring. The uncle asks about Kurtz: 'The climate may do away with this difficulty for you. Is he alone there?' The manager reveals Kurtz sent his assistant down with a note: 'Clear this poor devil out of the country, and don't bother sending more of that sort. I had rather be alone than have the kind of men you can dispose of with me.' They discuss Kurtz's ivory shipments—'lots of it—prime sort—lots—most annoying, from him.' The nephew fumes about Kurtz asking to be sent there 'with the idea of showing what he could do.' They hope the wilderness eliminates their rival. Marlow realizes: 'I seemed to see Kurtz for the first time'—a man who 'turning his back suddenly on the headquarters, on relief, on thoughts of home' chose absolute isolation over company politics. The journey upriver transforms into metaphysical experience: 'Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest.' The wilderness watches: 'It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect.' Marlow must navigate blind: 'When you have to attend to things of that sort, to the mere incidents of the surface, the reality—the reality, I tell you—fades. The inner truth is hidden—luckily, luckily.' His crew includes thirty cannibals who show inexplicable restraint despite deliberate starvation. The company pays them 'three pieces of brass wire, each about nine inches long' weekly 'to buy their provisions'—but there are no villages, no food. 'Why in the name of all the gnawing devils of hunger they didn't go for us—they were thirty to five—and have a good tuck-in for once, amazes me.' Marlow concludes: 'something restraining, one of those human secrets that baffle probability, had come into play.' They find an abandoned hut with stacked firewood and a warning scrawled on board: 'Wood for you. Hurry up. Approach cautiously.' Inside, a book: 'An Inquiry into some Points of Seamanship' with margin notes in what appears to be cipher. 'Fancy a man lugging with him a book of that description into this nowhere and studying it—and making notes—in cipher at that!' The discovery gives Marlow 'a delicious sensation of having come upon something unmistakably real.' They steam closer to Kurtz's station. Night falls with 'a dumb immobility' on the banks. At dawn, dense fog: 'more blinding than the night...standing all round you like something solid.' Then comes 'a cry, a very loud cry, as of infinite desolation'—followed by 'tumultuous and mournful uproar' that leaves them 'stiffened in a variety of silly attitudes.' Arrows fly. 'Sticks, little sticks, were flying about—thick.' The helmsman panics, Marlow fights to steer. A spear comes through the window: 'the shaft of a spear that, either thrown or lunged through the opening, had caught him in the side.' The helmsman dies, looking at Marlow with 'an amazing lustre,' clutching the spear 'with an air of being afraid I would try to take it away from him.' His death creates 'a subtle bond' Marlow recognizes only when broken: 'the intimate profundity of that look he gave me when he received his hurt remains to this day in my memory—like a claim of distant kinship affirmed in a supreme moment.' Marlow throws the body overboard—'The current snatched him as though he had been a wisp of grass.' His grief surprises him: he realizes he'd been anticipating not seeing Kurtz or shaking his hand, but hearing him: 'The man presented himself as a voice...his ability to talk, his words—the gift of expression, the bewildering, the illuminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness.' They approach Kurtz's station. Through glasses, Marlow sees 'half-a-dozen slim posts' with 'their upper ends ornamented with round carved balls'—the human heads not yet recognized. A figure on shore beckons. It's the Russian trader, patched and colored, looking 'like a harlequin.' He reveals: 'We have been attacked...They don't want him to go.' The attack was protective, not aggressive. The Russian speaks of Kurtz: 'This man has enlarged my mind.' He opens his arms wide, eyes perfectly round with wonder and devotion. The wilderness has claimed Kurtz completely.