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"Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees,
leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half
coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the
attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair.  Another
mine on the cliff went off, followed by a slight shudder
of the soil under my feet.  The work was going on.  The
work!  And this was the place where some of the helpers
had withdrawn to die.

"They were dying slowly--it was very clear.  They
were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were
nothing earthly now,--nothing but black shadows of
disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish
gloom.  Brought from all the recesses of the coast in all
the legality of time contracts, lost in uncongenial sur-
roundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, be-
came inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and
rest.  These moribund shapes were free as air--and
nearly as thin.  I began to distinguish the gleam of eyes
under the trees.  Then, glancing down, I saw a face
near my hand.  The black bones reclined at full length
with one shoulder against the tree, and slowly the eye-
lids rose and the sunken eyes looked up at me, enormous
and vacant, a kind of blind, white flicker in the depths
of the orbs, which died out slowly.  The man seemed
young--almost a boy--but you know with them it's hard
to tell.  I found nothing else to do but to offer him one
of my good Swede's ship's biscuits I had in my pocket.
The fingers closed slowly on it and held--there was no
other movement and no other glance.  He had tied a bit
of white worsted round his neck--Why?  Where did he
get it?  Was it a badge--an ornament--a charm--a
propitiatory act?  Was there any idea at all connected
with it?  It looked startling round his black neck, this
bit of white thread from beyond the seas.

"Near the same tree two more bundles of acute angles
sat with their legs drawn up.  One, with his chin
propped on his knees, stared at nothing, in an intoler-
able and appalling manner: his brother phantom rested
its forehead, as if overcome with a great weariness; and
all about others were scattered in every pose of contorted
collapse, as in some picture of a massacre or a pestilence.
While I stood horror-struck, one of these creatures rose
to his hands and knees, and went off on all-fours towards
the river to drink.  He lapped out of his hand, then sat
up in the sunlight, crossing his shins in front of him,
and after a time let his woolly head fall on his breast-
bone.

"I didn't want any more loitering in the shade, and
I made haste towards the station.  When near the build-
ings I met a white man, in such an unexpected elegance
of get-up that in the first moment I took him for a sort
of vision.  I saw a high starched collar, white cuffs, a
light alpaca jacket, snowy trousers, a clear necktie, and
varnished boots.  No hat.  Hair parted, brushed, oiled,
under a green-lined parasol held in a big white hand.
He was amazing, and had a penholder behind his ear.

"I shook hands with this miracle, and I learned he was
the Company's chief accountant, and that all the book-
keeping was done at this station.  He had come out for
a moment, he said, 'to get a breath of fresh air.'  The
expression sounded wonderfully odd, with its suggestion
of sedentary desk-life.  I wouldn't have mentioned the
fellow to you at all, only it was from his lips that I
first heard the name of the man who is so indissolubly
connected with the memories of that time.  Moreover, I
respected the fellow.  Yes; I respected his collars, his
vast cuffs, his brushed hair.  His appearance was cer-
tainly that of a hairdresser's dummy; but in the great
demoralization of the land he kept up his appearance.
That's backbone.  His starched collars and got-up shirt-
fronts were achievements of character.  He had been out
nearly three years; and, later on, I could not help ask-
ing him how he managed to sport such linen.  He had
just the faintest blush, and said modestly, 'I've been
teaching one of the native women about the station.  It
was difficult.  She had a distaste for the work.'  This
man had verily accomplished something.  And he was
devoted to his books, which were in apple-pie order.

"Everything else in the station was in a muddle,--
heads, things, buildings.  Strings of dusty niggers with
splay feet arrived and departed; a stream of manu-
factured goods, rubbishy cottons, beads, and brass-wire
set into the depths of darkness, and in return came a
precious trickle of ivory.

"I had to wait in the station for ten days--an eternity.
I lived in a hut in the yard, but to be out of the chaos
I would sometimes get into the accountant's office.  It
was built of horizontal planks, and so badly put together
that, as he bent over his high desk, he was barred from
neck to heels with narrow strips of sunlight.  There was
no need to open the big shutter to see.  It was hot
there too; big flies buzzed fiendishly, and did not sting,
but stabbed.  I sat generally on the floor, while, of
faultless appearance (and even slightly scented), perch-
ing on a high stool, he wrote, he wrote.  Sometimes he
stood up for exercise.  When a truckle-bed with a sick
man (some invalided agent from up-country) was put in
there, he exhibited a gentle annoyance.  'The groans of
this sick person,' he said, distract my attention.  And
without that it is extremely difficult to guard against
clerical errors in this climate.'

"One day he remarked, without lifting his head, 'In
the interior you will no doubt meet Mr. Kurtz.'  On my
asking who Mr. Kurtz was, he said he was a first-class
agent; and seeing my disappointment at this informa-
tion, he added slowly, laying down his pen, 'He is a very
remarkable person.'  Further questions elicited from him
that Mr. Kurtz was at present in charge of a trading
post, a very important one, in the true ivory-country,
at 'the very bottom of there.  Sends in as much ivory
as all the others put together. . . .'  He began to
write again.  The sick man was too ill to groan.  The
flies buzzed in a great peace.

"Suddenly there was a growing murmur of voices and
a great tramping of feet.  A caravan had come in.  A
violent babble of uncouth sounds burst out on the other
side of the planks.  All the carriers were speaking to-
gether, and in the midst of the uproar the lamentable
voice of the chief agent was heard 'giving it up' tear-
fully for the twentieth time that day. . . .  He rose
slowly.  'What a frightful row,' he said.  He crossed
the room gently to look at the sick man, and returning,
said to me, 'He does not hear.'  'What!  Dead?' I
asked, startled.  'No, not yet,' he answered, with great
composure.  Then, alluding with a toss of the head to
the tumult in the station-yard, 'When one has got to
make correct entries, one comes to hate those savages--
hate them to the death.'  He remained thoughtful for a
moment.  'When you see Mr. Kurtz,' he went on, 'tell
him from me that everything here'--he glanced at the
desk--'is very satisfactory.  I don't like to write to him
--with those messengers of ours you never know who
may get hold of your letter--at that Central Station.'
He stared at me for a moment with his mild, bulging
eyes.  'Oh, he will go far, very far,' he began again.
'He will be a somebody in the Administration before
long.  They, above--the Council in Europe, you know
--mean him to be.'

"He turned to his work.  The noise outside had ceased,
and presently in going out I stopped at the door.  In
the steady buzz of flies the homeward-bound agent was
lying flushed and insensible; the other, bent over his
books, was making correct entries of perfectly correct
transactions; and fifty feet below the doorstep I could
see the still tree-tops of the grove of death.

"Next day I left that station at last, with a caravan
of sixty men, for a two-hundred-mile tramp.

"No use telling you much about that.  Paths, paths,
everywhere; a stamped-in network of paths spreading
over the empty land, through long grass, through burnt
grass, through thickets, down and up chilly ravines, up
and down stony hills ablaze with heat; and a solitude,
a solitude, nobody, not a hut.  The population had
cleared out a long time ago.  Well, if a lot of mysterious
niggers armed with all kinds of fearful weapons sud-
denly took to traveling on the road between Deal and
Gravesend, catching the yokels right and left to carry
heavy loads for them, I fancy every farm and cottage
thereabouts would get empty very soon.  Only here the
dwellings were gone too.  Still I passed through several
abandoned villages.  There's something pathetically
childish in the ruins of grass walls.  Day after day, with
the stamp and shuffle of sixty pair of bare feet behind
me, each pair under a 60-lb. load.  Camp, cook, sleep,
strike camp, march.  Now and then a carrier dead in
harness, at rest in the long grass near the path, with
an empty water-gourd and his long staff lying by his
side.  A great silence around and above.  Perhaps on
some quiet night the tremor of far-off drums, sinking,
swelling, a tremor vast, faint; a sound weird, appealing,
suggestive, and wild--and perhaps with as profound a
meaning as the sound of bells in a Christian country.
Once a white man in an unbuttoned uniform, camping
on the path with an armed escort of lank Zanzibaris,
very hospitable and festive--not to say drunk.  Was
looking after the upkeep of the road, he declared.  Can't
say I saw any road or any upkeep, unless the body of a
middle-aged negro, with a bullet-hole in the forehead,
upon which I absolutely stumbled three miles farther on,
may be considered as a permanent improvement.  I had
a white companion too, not a bad chap, but rather too
fleshy and with the exasperating habit of fainting on
the hot hillsides, miles away from the least bit of shade
and water.  Annoying, you know, to hold your own coat
like a parasol over a man's head while he is coming-to.
I couldn't help asking him once what he meant by coming
there at all.  'To make money, of course.  What do
you think?' he said, scornfully.  Then he got fever, and
had to be carried in a hammock slung under a pole.  As
he weighed sixteen stone I had no end of rows with the
carriers.  They jibbed, ran away, sneaked off with their
loads in the night--quite a mutiny.  So, one evening,
I made a speech in English with gestures, not one of
which was lost to the sixty pairs of eyes before me, and
the next morning I started the hammock off in front all
right.  An hour afterwards I came upon the whole con-
cern wrecked in a bush--man, hammock, groans, blankets,
horrors.  The heavy pole had skinned his poor nose.  He
was very anxious for me to kill somebody, but there
wasn't the shadow of a carrier near.  I remembered the
old doctor,--'It would be interesting for science to
watch the mental changes of individuals, on the spot.'
I felt I was becoming scientifically interesting.  How-
ever, all that is to no purpose.  On the fifteenth day I
came in sight of the big river again, and hobbled into
the Central Station.  It was on a back water surrounded
by scrub and forest, with a pretty border of smelly mud
on one side, and on the three others inclosed by a crazy
fence of rushes.  A neglected gap was all the gate it
had, and the first glance at the place was enough to let
you see the flabby devil was running that show.  White
men with long staves in their hands appeared languidly
from amongst the buildings, strolling up to take a look
at me, and then retired out of sight somewhere.  One
of them, a stout, excitable chap with black mustaches,
informed me with great volubility and many digressions,
as soon as I told him who I was, that my steamer was at
the bottom of the river.  I was thunderstruck.  What,
how, why?  Oh, it was 'all right.'  The 'manager him-
self' was there.  All quite correct.  'Everybody had
behaved splendidly! splendidly!'--'you must,' he said
in agitation, 'go and see the general manager at once.
He is waiting!'

"I did not see the real significance of that wreck at
once.  I fancy I see it now, but I am not sure--not at
all.  Certainly the affair was too stupid--when I think
of it--to be altogether natural.  Still. . . .  But at the
moment it presented itself simply as a confounded nui-
sance.  The steamer was sunk.  They had started two
days before in a sudden hurry up the river with the
manager on board, in charge of some volunteer skipper,
and before they had been out three hours they tore the
bottom out of her on stones, and she sank near the south
bank.  I asked myself what I was to do there, now my
boat was lost.  As a matter of fact, I had plenty to do
in fishing my command out of the river.  I had to set
about it the very next day.  That, and the repairs when
I brought the pieces to the station, took some months.

"My first interview with the manager was curious.  He
did not ask me to sit down after my twenty-mile walk
that morning.  He was commonplace in complexion, in
features, in manners, and in voice.  He was of middle
size and of ordinary build.  His eyes, of the usual blue,