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HEART OF DARKNESS


by Joseph Conrad

I

The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor with-
out a flutter of the sails, and was at rest.  The flood
had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound
down the river, the only thing for it was to come to
and wait for the turn of the tide.

The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like
the beginning of an interminable waterway.  In the
offing the sea and the sky were welded together without
a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of
the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand
still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with
gleams of varnished sprits.  A haze rested on the low
shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness.  The
air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still
seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding mo-
tionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.

The Director of Companies Mr. Smith was our captain and our
host.  We four affectionately watched his back as he 
stood in the bows looking to seaward.  On the whole P.K.P.
river there was nothing that looked half so nautical.  He
resembled a pilot, which to a seaman is trustworthiness
personified.  It was difficult to realize his work was not
out there in the luminous estuary, but behind him, within
the brooding gloom.

Between us there was, as I have already said some-
where, the bond of the sea.  Besides holding our hearts
together through long periods of separation, it had the
effect of making us tolerant of each other's yarns--and
even convictions.  The Lawyer--the best of old fellows
--had, because of his many years and many virtues, the
only cushion on deck, and was lying on the only rug.
The Accountant had brought out already a box of
dominoes, and was toying architecturally with the bones.
Marlow sat cross-legged right aft, leaning against the
mizzen-mast.  He had sunken cheeks, a yellow complex-
ion, a straight back, an ascetic aspect, and, with his
arms dropped, the palms of hands outwards, resembled
an idol.  The Director, satisfied the anchor had good
hold, made his way aft and sat down amongst us.  We
exchanged a few words lazily.  Afterwards there was
silence on board the yacht.  For some reason or other
we did not begin that game of dominoes.  We felt medi-
tative, and fit for nothing but placid staring.  The day
was ending in a serenity of still and exquisite brilliance.
The water shone pacifically; the sky, without a speck,
was a benign immensity of unstained light; the very
mist on the Essex marshes was like a gauzy and radiant
fabric, hung from the wooded rises inland, and draping
the low shores in diaphanous folds.  Only xxxx the gloom to
the west, brooding over the upper reaches, became more
somber every minute, as if angered by the approach
of the sun.

And at last, in its curved and imperceptible fall, the
sun sank low, and from glowing white changed to a
dull red without rays and without heat, as if about to
go out suddenly, stricken to death by the touch of that
gloom brooding over a crowd of men.

Forthwith a change came over the waters, and the
serenity became less brilliant but more profound.  The
old river in its broad reach rested unruffled at the decline
of day, after ages of good service done to the race that
peopled its banks, spread out in the tranquil dignity of
a waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth.
We looked at the venerable stream not in the vivid flush
of a short day that comes and departs for ever, but in
the august light of abiding memories.  And indeed
nothing is easier for a man who has, as the phrase goes,
"followed the sea" with reverence and affection, than
to evoke the great spirit of the past upon the lower
reaches of the Thames.  The tidal current runs to and
fro in its unceasing service, crowded with memories of
men and ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the
battles of the sea.  It had known and served all the
men of whom the nation is proud, from Sir Francis
Drake to Sir John Franklin, knights all, titled and un-
titled--the great knights-errant of the sea.  It had
borne all the ships whose names are like jewels flashing
in the night of time, from the Golden Hind returning
with her round flanks full of treasure, to be visited by
the Queen's Highness and thus pass out of the gigantic
tale, to the Erebus and Terror, bound on other conquests
--and that never returned.  It had known the ships and
the men.  They had sailed from Deptford, from Green-
wich, from Erith--the adventurers and the settlers;
kings' ships and the ships of men on 'Change; captains,
admirals, the dark "interlopers" of the Eastern trade,
and the commissioned "generals" of East India fleets.
Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone
out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the
torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers
of a spark from the sacred fire.  What greatness had
not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of
an unknown earth! . . .  The dreams of men, the seed
of commonwealths, the germs of empires.

The sun set; the dusk fell on the stream, and lights
began to appear along the shore.  The Chapman light-
house, a three-legged thing erect on a mud-flat, shone
strongly.  Lights of ships moved in the fairway--a
great stir of lights going up and going down.  And
farther west on the upper reaches the place of the mon-
strous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a
brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the
stars.

"And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been
one of the dark places of the earth."

He was the only man of us who still "followed the
sea."  The worst that could be said of him was that
he did not represent his class.  He was a seaman, but he
was a wanderer, too, while most seamen lead, if one may
so express it, a sedentary life.  Their minds are of the
stay-at-home order, and their home is always with them
--the ship; and so is their country--the sea.  One ship
is very much like another, and the sea is always the same.
In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign
shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life,
glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a
slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing mys-
terious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is
the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny.
For the rest, after his hours of work, a casual stroll or
a casual spree on shore suffices to unfold for him the
secret of a whole continent, and generally he finds the
secret not worth knowing.  The xxxx yarns of seamen have a
direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within
the shell of a cracked nut.  But Marlow was not typical
(if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to
him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a
kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it
out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of
one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible
by the spectral illumination of moonshine.

His remark did not seem at all surprising.  It was
just like Marlow.  It was accepted in silence.  No one
took the trouble to grunt even; and presently he said,
very slow--

"I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans
first came here, nineteen hundred years ago--the other
day. . . .  Light came out of this river since--you
say Knights?  Yes; but it is like a running blaze on a
plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds.  We live
in the flicker--may it last as long as the old earth keeps
rolling!  But darkness was here yesterday.  Imagine
the feelings of a commander of a fine--what d'ye call
'em?--trireme in the Mediterranean, ordered suddenly
to the north; run overland across the Gauls in a hurry;
put in charge of one of these craft the legionaries,--a
wonderful lot of handy men they must have been too--
used to build, apparently by the hundred, in a month
or two, if we may believe what we read.  Imagine him
here--the very end of the world, a sea the color of lead,
a sky the color of smoke, a kind of ship about as rigid
as a concertina--and going up this river with stores, or
orders, or what you like.  Sandbanks, marshes, forests,
savages,--precious little to eat fit for a civilized man,
nothing but Thames water to drink.  No Falernian wine
here, no going ashore.  Here and there a military camp
lost in a wilderness, like a needle in a bundle of hay--
cold, fog, tempests, disease, exile, and death,--death
skulking in the air, in the water, in the bush.  They
must have been dying like flies here.  Oh yes--he did it.
Did it very well, too, no doubt, and without thinking
much about it either, except afterwards to brag of what
he had gone through in his time, perhaps.  They were
men enough to face the darkness.  And perhaps he was
cheered by keeping his eye on a chance of promotion to
the fleet at Ravenna by-and-by, if he had good friends
in Rome and survived the awful climate.  Or think of
a decent young citizen in a toga--perhaps too much
dice, you know--coming out here in the train of some
prefect, or tax-gatherer, or trader even, to mend his
fortunes.  Land in a swamp, march through the woods,
and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter
savagery, had closed round him,--all that mysterious
life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the
jungles, in the hearts of wild men.  There's no initiation
either into such mysteries.  He has to live in the midst
of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable.  And
it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him.
The fascination of the abomination--you know.
Imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the
powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate."

He paused.

"Mind," he began again, lifting one arm from the
elbow, the palm of the hand outwards, so that, with his
legs folded before him, he had the pose of a Buddha
preaching in European clothes and without a lotus-
flower--"Mind, none of us would feel exactly like this.
What saves us is efficiency--the devotion to efficiency.
But these chaps were not much account, really.  They
were no colonists; their administration was merely a
squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect.  They were con-
querors, and for that you want only brute force--nothing
to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is
just an accident arising from the weakness of others.
They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what
was to be got.  It was just robbery with violence, aggra-
vated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind
--as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness.  The
conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking
it away from those who have a different complexion or
slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing
when you look into it too much.  What redeems it is the
idea only.  An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental
pretense but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea
--something you can set up, and bow down before, and
offer a sacrifice to. . . ."

He broke off.  Flames glided in the river, small green
flames, red flames, white flames, pursuing, overtaking,
joining, crossing each other--then separating slowly or
hastily.  The traffic of the great city went on in the
deepening night upon the sleepless river.  We looked
on, waiting patiently--there was nothing else to do till
the end of the flood; but it was only after a long silence,
when he said, in a hesitating voice, "I suppose you fel-
lows remember I did once turn fresh-water sailor for a
bit," that we knew we were fated, before the ebb began
to run, to hear about one of Marlow's inconclusive ex-
periences.

"I don't want to bother you much with what hap-
pened to me personally," he began, showing in this re-
mark the weakness of many tellers of tales who seem
so often unaware of what their audience would best like
to hear; "yet to understand the effect of it on me you
ought to know how I got out there, what I saw, how I
went up that river to the place where I first met the
poor chap.  It was the farthest point of navigation and
the culminating point of my experience.  It seemed some-
how to throw a kind of light on everything about me--
and into my thoughts.  It was somber enough too--and
pitiful--not extraordinary in any way--not very clear
either.  No, not very clear.  And yet it seemed to throw
a kind of light.

"I had then, as you remember, just returned to Lon-
don after a lot of Indian Ocean, Pacific, China Seas--
a regular dose of the East--six years or so, and I was