"Try to be civil, Marlow," growled a voice, and I knew there was at
least one listener awake besides myself.
"I beg your pardon. I forgot the heartache which makes up the rest of
the price. And indeed what does the price matter, if the trick be well
done? You do your tricks very well. And I didn't do badly either, since
I managed not to sink that steamboat on my first trip. It's a wonder to
me yet. Imagine a blindfolded man set to drive a van over a bad road.
I sweated and shivered over that business considerably, I can tell
you. After all, for a seaman, to scrape the bottom of the thing that's
supposed to float all the time under his care is the unpardonable sin.
No one may know of it, but you never forget the thump--eh? A blow on the
very heart. You remember it, you dream of it, you wake up at night and
think of it--years after--and go hot and cold all over. I don't pretend
to say that steamboat floated all the time. More than once she had to
wade for a bit, with twenty cannibals splashing around and pushing.
We had enlisted some of these chaps on the way for a crew. Fine
fellows--cannibals--in their place. They were men one could work with,
and I am grateful to them. And, after all, they did not eat each other
before my face: they had brought along a provision of hippo-meat
which went rotten, and made the mystery of the wilderness stink in my
nostrils. Phoo! I can sniff it now. I had the manager on board and three
or four pilgrims with their staves--all complete. Sometimes we came
upon a station close by the bank, clinging to the skirts of the unknown,
and the white men rushing out of a tumble-down hovel, with great
gestures of joy and surprise and welcome, seemed very strange--had the
appearance of being held there captive by a spell. The word ivory would
ring in the air for a while--and on we went again into the silence,
along empty reaches, round the still bends, between the high walls of
our winding way, reverberating in hollow claps the ponderous beat of the
stern-wheel. Trees, trees, millions of trees, massive, immense, running
up high; and at their foot, hugging the bank against the stream, crept
the little begrimed steamboat, like a sluggish beetle crawling on the
floor of a lofty portico. It made you feel very small, very lost, and
yet it was not altogether depressing, that feeling. After all, if you
were small, the grimy beetle crawled on--which was just what you wanted
it to do. Where the pilgrims imagined it crawled to I don't know.
To some place where they expected to get something. I bet! For me it
crawled towards Kurtz--exclusively; but when the steam-pipes started
leaking we crawled very slow. The reaches opened before us and closed
behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar
the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart
of darkness. It was very quiet there. At night sometimes the roll of
drums behind the curtain of trees would run up the river and remain
sustained faintly, as if hovering in the air high over our heads, till
the first break of day. Whether it meant war, peace, or prayer we could
not tell. The dawns were heralded by the descent of a chill stillness;
the wood-cutters slept, their fires burned low; the snapping of a twig
would make you start. Were were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an
earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied
ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance,
to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil. But
suddenly, as we struggled round a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush
walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs,
a mass of hands clapping of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes
rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage. The steamer
toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy.
The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us--who
could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings;
we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane
men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could
not understand because we were too far and could not remember because we
were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone,
leaving hardly a sign--and no memories.
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