No More Learning

Beyond the fence the
forest stood up spectrally in the moonlight, and through the dim stir,
through the faint sounds of that lamentable courtyard, the silence of
the land went home to one's very heart,--its mystery, its greatness,
the amazing reality of its concealed life. The hurt nigger moaned feebly
somewhere near by, and then fetched a deep sigh that made me mend my
pace away from there. I felt a hand introducing itself under my arm.
'My dear sir,' said the fellow, 'I don't want to be misunderstood, and
especially by you, who will see Mr. Kurtz long before I can have that
pleasure. I wouldn't like him to get a false idea of my
disposition. . . . '


"I let him run on, this _papier-mache_ Mephistopheles, and it seemed to
me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find
nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe. He, don't you see, had
been planning to be assistant-manager by-and-by under the present man,
and I could see that the coming of that Kurtz had upset them both not a
little. He talked precipitately, and I did not try to stop him. I had my
shoulders against the wreck of my steamer, hauled up on the slope like a
carcass of some big river animal. The smell of mud, of primeval mud,
by Jove! was in my nostrils, the high stillness of primeval forest was
before my eyes; there were shiny patches on the black creek. The moon
had spread over everything a thin layer of silver--over the rank grass,
over the mud, upon the wall of matted vegetation standing higher than
the wall of a temple, over the great river I could see through a somber
gap glittering, glittering, as it flowed broadly by without a murmur.
All this was great, expectant, mute, while the man jabbered about
himself. I wondered whether the stillness on the face of the immensity
looking at us two were meant as an appeal or as a menace. What were we
who had strayed in here? Could we handle that dumb thing, or would it
handle us? I felt how big, how confoundedly big, was that thing that
couldn't talk, and perhaps was deaf as well. What was in there? I could
see a little ivory coming out from there, and I had heard Mr. Kurtz was
in there. I had heard enough about it too--God knows! Yet somehow it
didn't bring any image with it--no more than if I had been told an angel
or a fiend was in there. I believed it in the same way one of you might
believe there are inhabitants in the planet Mars. I knew once a Scotch
sailmaker who was certain, dead sure, there were people in Mars. If you
asked him for some idea how they looked and behaved, he would get shy
and mutter something about 'walking on all-fours. ' If you as much as
smiled, he would--though a man of sixty--offer to fight you. I would not
have gone so far as to fight for Kurtz, but I went for him near enough
to a lie. You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because
I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me.
There is a taint of death, a flavor of mortality in lies,--which is
exactly what I hate and detest in the world--what I want to forget.
It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do.
Temperament, I suppose. Well, I went near enough to it by letting the
young fool there believe anything he liked to imagine as to my influence
in Europe. I became in an instant as much of a pretense as the rest of
the bewitched pilgrims. This simply because I had a notion it somehow
would be of help to that Kurtz whom at the time I did not see--you
understand. He was just a word for me. I did not see the man in the name
any more than you do. Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see
anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream--making a vain
attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation,
that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of
struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which
is of the very essence of dreams. . . . "

He was silent for a while.

". . . No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the
life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence,--that which
makes its truth, its meaning--its subtle and penetrating essence. It is
impossible. We live, as we dream--alone. . . . "

He paused again as if reflecting, then added--"Of course in this you
fellows see more than I could then. You see me, whom you know. . . . "

It had become so pitch dark that we listeners could hardly see one
another. For a long time already he, sitting apart, had been no more
to us than a voice. There was not a word from anybody. The others might
have been asleep, but I was awake. I listened, I listened on the watch
for the sentence, for the word, that would give me the clew to the
faint uneasiness inspired by this narrative that seemed to shape itself
without human lips in the heavy night-air of the river.

". . . Yes--I let him run on," Marlow began again, "and think what
he pleased about the powers that were behind me. I did! And there was
nothing behind me! There was nothing but that wretched, old, mangled
steamboat I was leaning against, while he talked fluently about 'the
necessity for every man to get on. ' 'And when one comes out here, you
conceive, it is not to gaze at the moon. ' Mr. Kurtz was a 'universal
genius,' but even a genius would find it easier to work with 'adequate
tools--intelligent men. ' He did not make bricks--why, there was a
physical impossibility in the way--as I was well aware; and if he
did secretarial work for the manager, it was because 'no sensible man
rejects wantonly the confidence of his superiors. ' Did I see it? I saw
it. What more did I want? What I really wanted was rivets, by heaven!
Rivets. To get on with the work--to stop the hole. Rivets I
wanted. There were cases of them down at the coast--cases--piled
up--burst--split! You kicked a loose rivet at every second step in that
station yard on the hillside. Rivets had rolled into the grove of death.
You could fill your pockets with rivets for the trouble of stooping
down--and there wasn't one rivet to be found where it was wanted. We had
plates that would do, but nothing to fasten them with. And every week
the messenger, a lone negro, letter-bag on shoulder and staff in hand,
left our station for the coast. And several times a week a coast caravan
came in with trade goods,--ghastly glazed calico that made you shudder
only to look at it, glass beads value about a penny a quart, confounded
spotted cotton handkerchiefs. And no rivets. Three carriers could have
brought all that was wanted to set that steamboat afloat.

"He was becoming confidential now, but I fancy my unresponsive attitude
must have exasperated him at last, for he judged it necessary to inform
me he feared neither God nor devil, let alone any mere man. I said I
could see that very well, but what I wanted was a certain quantity of
rivets--and rivets were what really Mr. Kurtz wanted, if he had only
known it. Now letters went to the coast every week. . . . 'My dear
sir,' he cried, 'I write from dictation. ' I demanded rivets. There was
a way--for an intelligent man. He changed his manner; became very
cold, and suddenly began to talk about a hippopotamus; wondered whether
sleeping on board the steamer (I stuck to my salvage night and day)
I wasn't disturbed. There was an old hippo that had the bad habit of
getting out on the bank and roaming at night over the station grounds.
The pilgrims used to turn out in a body and empty every rifle they could
lay hands on at him. Some even had sat up o' nights for him. All this
energy was wasted, though. 'That animal has a charmed life,' he said;
'but you can say this only of brutes in this country. No man--you
apprehend me? --no man here bears a charmed life. ' He stood there for
a moment in the moonlight with his delicate hooked nose set a little
askew, and his mica eyes glittering without a wink, then, with a curt
Good night, he strode off. I could see he was disturbed and considerably
puzzled, which made me feel more hopeful than I had been for days. It
was a great comfort to turn from that chap to my influential friend, the
battered, twisted, ruined, tin-pot steamboat. I clambered on board. She
rang under my feet like an empty Huntley & Palmer biscuit-tin kicked
along a gutter; she was nothing so solid in make, and rather less pretty
in shape, but I had expended enough hard work on her to make me love
her. No influential friend would have served me better. She had given
me a chance to come out a bit--to find out what I could do. No, I don't
like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that
can be done. I don't like work--no man does--but I like what is in the
work,--the chance to find yourself. Your own reality--for yourself, not
for others--what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere
show, and never can tell what it really means.

"I was not surprised to see somebody sitting aft, on the deck, with
his legs dangling over the mud. You see I rather chummed with the few
mechanics there were in that station, whom the other pilgrims naturally
despised--on account of their imperfect manners, I suppose. This was the
foreman--a boiler-maker by trade--a good worker. He was a lank, bony,
yellow-faced man, with big intense eyes. His aspect was worried, and his
head was as bald as the palm of my hand; but his hair in falling seemed
to have stuck to his chin, and had prospered in the new locality,
for his beard hung down to his waist. He was a widower with six young
children (he had left them in charge of a sister of his to come out
there), and the passion of his life was pigeon-flying. He was an
enthusiast and a connoisseur. He would rave about pigeons. After work
hours he used sometimes to come over from his hut for a talk about his
children and his pigeons; at work, when he had to crawl in the mud under
the bottom of the steamboat, he would tie up that beard of his in a kind
of white serviette he brought for the purpose. It had loops to go over
his ears. In the evening he could be seen squatted on the bank rinsing
that wrapper in the creek with great care, then spreading it solemnly on
a bush to dry.

"I slapped him on the back and shouted, 'We shall have rivets! ' He
scrambled to his feet exclaiming 'No! Rivets! ' as though he couldn't
believe his ears. Then in a low voice, 'You . . . eh? ' I don't know why
we behaved like lunatics. I put my finger to the side of my nose and
nodded mysteriously. 'Good for you! ' he cried, snapped his fingers above
his head, lifting one foot. I tried a jig. We capered on the iron deck.
A frightful clatter came out of that hulk, and the virgin forest on
the other bank of the creek sent it back in a thundering roll upon the
sleeping station. It must have made some of the pilgrims sit up in their
hovels. A dark figure obscured the lighted doorway of the manager's hut,
vanished, then, a second or so after, the doorway itself vanished too.
We stopped, and the silence driven away by the stamping of our feet
flowed back again from the recesses of the land. The great wall of
vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass of trunks, branches, leaves,
boughs, festoons, motionless in the moonlight, was like a rioting
invasion of soundless life, a rolling wave of plants, piled up, crested,
ready to topple over the creek, to sweep every little man of us out
of his little existence. And it moved not. A deadened burst of mighty
splashes and snorts reached us from afar, as though an ichthyosaurus had
been taking a bath of glitter in the great river. 'After all,' said the
boiler-maker in a reasonable tone, 'why shouldn't we get the rivets? '
Why not, indeed! I did not know of any reason why we shouldn't. 'They'll
come in three weeks,' I said confidently.

"But they didn't. Instead of rivets there came an invasion, an
infliction, a visitation. It came in sections during the next three
weeks, each section headed by a donkey carrying a white man in new
clothes and tan shoes, bowing from that elevation right and left to the
impressed pilgrims. A quarrelsome band of footsore sulky niggers trod on
the heels of the donkeys; a lot of tents, camp-stools, tin boxes, white
cases, brown bales would be shot down in the courtyard, and the air of
mystery would deepen a little over the muddle of the station. Five such
installments came, with their absurd air of disorderly flight with the
loot of innumerable outfit shops and provision stores, that, one
would think, they were lugging, after a raid, into the wilderness for
equitable division. It was an inextricable mess of things decent in
themselves but that human folly made look like the spoils of thieving.

"This devoted band called itself the Eldorado Exploring Expedition, and
I believe they were sworn to secrecy. Their talk, however, was the talk
of sordid buccaneers: it was reckless without hardihood, greedy without
audacity, and cruel without courage; there was not an atom of foresight
or of serious intention in the whole batch of them, and they did not
seem aware these things are wanted for the work of the world. To tear
treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more
moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into
a safe. Who paid the expenses of the noble enterprise I don't know; but
the uncle of our manager was leader of that lot.

"In exterior he resembled a butcher in a poor neighborhood, and his eyes
had a look of sleepy cunning. He carried his fat paunch with ostentation
on his short legs, and during the time his gang infested the station
spoke to no one but his nephew. You could see these two roaming about
all day long with their heads close together in an everlasting confab.

"I had given up worrying myself about the rivets. One's capacity for
that kind of folly is more limited than you would suppose. I said
Hang! --and let things slide. I had plenty of time for meditation,
and now and then I would give some thought to Kurtz. I wasn't very
interested in him. No. Still, I was curious to see whether this man, who
had come out equipped with moral ideas of some sort, would climb to the
top after all, and how he would set about his work when there. "


II


"One evening as I was lying flat on the deck of my steamboat, I heard
voices approaching--and there were the nephew and the uncle strolling
along the bank. I laid my head on my arm again, and had nearly lost
myself in a doze, when somebody said in my ear, as it were: 'I am as
harmless as a little child, but I don't like to be dictated to. Am I the
manager--or am I not? I was ordered to send him there. It's incredible. '
. . . I became aware that the two were standing on the shore alongside
the forepart of the steamboat, just below my head. I did not move; it
did not occur to me to move: I was sleepy. 'It _is_ unpleasant,' grunted
the uncle. 'He has asked the Administration to be sent there,' said the
other, 'with the idea of showing what he could do; and I was instructed
accordingly. Look at the influence that man must have. Is it not
frightful? ' They both agreed it was frightful, then made several bizarre
remarks: 'Make rain and fine weather--one man--the Council--by the
nose'--bits of absurd sentences that got the better of my drowsiness,
so that I had pretty near the whole of my wits about me when the uncle
said, 'The climate may do away with this difficulty for you. Is he alone
there? ' 'Yes,' answered the manager; 'he sent his assistant down the
river with a note to me in these terms: "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. " It was more
than a year ago.
Can you imagine such impudence! ' 'Anything since
then? ' asked the other, hoarsely. 'Ivory,' jerked the nephew; 'lots
of it--prime sort--lots--most annoying, from him. ' 'And with that? '
questioned the heavy rumble. 'Invoice,' was the reply fired out, so to
speak. Then silence. They had been talking about Kurtz.

"I was broad awake by this time, but, lying perfectly at ease, remained
still, having no inducement to change my position. 'How did that ivory
come all this way? ' growled the elder man, who seemed very vexed. The
other explained that it had come with a fleet of canoes in charge of an
English half-caste clerk Kurtz had with him; that Kurtz had apparently
intended to return himself, the station being by that time bare of goods
and stores, but after coming three hundred miles, had suddenly decided
to go back, which he started to do alone in a small dug-out with four
paddlers, leaving the half-caste to continue down the river with the
ivory. The two fellows there seemed astounded at anybody attempting such
a thing. They were at a loss for an adequate motive. As to me, I seemed
to see Kurtz for the first time. It was a distinct glimpse: the dug-out,
four paddling savages, and the lone white man turning his back suddenly
on the headquarters, on relief, on thoughts of home--perhaps; setting
his face towards the depths of the wilderness, towards his empty and
desolate station. I did not know the motive. Perhaps he was just simply
a fine fellow who stuck to his work for its own sake. His name, you
understand, had not been pronounced once. He was 'that man. ' The
half-caste, who, as far as I could see, had conducted a difficult
trip with great prudence and pluck, was invariably alluded to as 'that
scoundrel. ' The 'scoundrel' had reported that the 'man' had been very
ill--had recovered imperfectly. . . . The two below me moved away then a
few paces, and strolled back and forth at some little distance. I heard:
'Military post--doctor--two hundred miles--quite alone now--unavoidable
delays--nine months--no news--strange rumors. ' They approached again,
just as the manager was saying, 'No one, as far as I know, unless a
species of wandering trader--a pestilential fellow, snapping ivory from
the natives. ' Who was it they were talking about now? I gathered in
snatches that this was some man supposed to be in Kurtz's district, and
of whom the manager did not approve. 'We will not be free from unfair
competition till one of these fellows is hanged for an example,'
he said. 'Certainly,' grunted the other; 'get him hanged! Why not?
Anything--anything can be done in this country. That's what I say;
nobody here, you understand, _here_, can endanger your position. And
why? You stand the climate--you outlast them all. The danger is in
Europe; but there before I left I took care to--' They moved off and
whispered, then their voices rose again. 'The extraordinary series of
delays is not my fault. I did my possible. ' The fat man sighed, 'Very
sad. ' 'And the pestiferous absurdity of his talk,' continued the other;
'he bothered me enough when he was here. "Each station should be like a
beacon on the road towards better things, a center for trade of course,
but also for humanizing, improving, instructing. " Conceive you--that
ass! And he wants to be manager! No, it's--' Here he got choked by
excessive indignation, and I lifted my head the least bit. I was
surprised to see how near they were--right under me. I could have spat
upon their hats. They were looking on the ground, absorbed in thought.
The manager was switching his leg with a slender twig: his sagacious
relative lifted his head. 'You have been well since you came out this
time? ' he asked. The other gave a start. 'Who? I? Oh! Like a charm--like
a charm. But the rest--oh, my goodness! All sick. They die so quick,
too, that I haven't the time to send them out of the country--it's
incredible! ' 'H'm. Just so,' grunted the uncle. 'Ah! my boy, trust to
this--I say, trust to this. ' I saw him extend his short flipper of
an arm for a gesture that took in the forest, the creek, the mud, the
river,--seemed to beckon with a dishonoring flourish before the sunlit
face of the land a treacherous appeal to the lurking death, to the
hidden evil, to the profound darkness of its heart. It was so startling
that I leaped to my feet and looked back at the edge of the forest, as
though I had expected an answer of some sort to that black display of
confidence. You know the foolish notions that come to one sometimes. The
high stillness confronted these two figures with its ominous patience,
waiting for the passing away of a fantastic invasion.

"They swore aloud together--out of sheer fright, I believe--then
pretending not to know anything of my existence, turned back to the
station. The sun was low; and leaning forward side by side, they seemed
to be tugging painfully uphill their two ridiculous shadows of unequal
length, that trailed behind them slowly over the tall grass without
bending a single blade.

"In a few days the Eldorado Expedition went into the patient wilderness,
that closed upon it as the sea closes over a diver. Long afterwards the
news came that all the donkeys were dead. I know nothing as to the fate
of the less valuable animals. They, no doubt, like the rest of us, found
what they deserved. I did not inquire. I was then rather excited at
the prospect of meeting Kurtz very soon. When I say very soon I mean
it comparatively. It was just two months from the day we left the creek
when we came to the bank below Kurtz's station.

"Going up that river was like traveling 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 air
was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of
sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into
the gloom of overshadowed distances. On silvery sandbanks hippos and
alligators sunned themselves side by side. The broadening waters flowed
through a mob of wooded islands; you lost your way on that river as you
would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to
find the channel, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off for
ever from everything you had known once--somewhere--far away--in another
existence perhaps. There were moments when one's past came back to one,
as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare to yourself;
but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered
with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of
plants, and water, and silence. And this stillness of life did not in
the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force
brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful
aspect. I got used to it afterwards; I did not see it any more; I had no
time. I had to keep guessing at the channel; I had to discern, mostly by
inspiration, the signs of hidden banks; I watched for sunken stones; I
was learning to clap my teeth smartly before my heart flew out, when I
shaved by a fluke some infernal sly old snag that would have ripped the
life out of the tin-pot steamboat and drowned all the pilgrims; I had to
keep a look-out for the signs of dead wood we could cut up in the night
for next day's steaming. 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. But I felt it
all the same; I felt often its mysterious stillness watching me at
my monkey tricks, just as it watches you fellows performing on your
respective tight-ropes for--what is it? half-a-crown a tumble--"

"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 toward 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 woodcutters slept, their fires burned low; the snapping of a twig
would make you start. We 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 traveling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone,
leaving hardly a sign--and no memories.

"The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled
form of a conquered monster, but there--there you could look at a thing
monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were--No, they were
not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it--this suspicion of
their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled, and
leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just
the thought of their humanity--like yours--the thought of your remote
kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly
enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that
there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible
frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it
which you--you so remote from the night of first ages--could comprehend.
And why not? The mind of man is capable of anything--because everything
is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after
all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valor, rage--who can tell? --but
truth--truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and
shudder--the man knows, and can look on without a wink. But he must at
least be as much of a man as these on the shore. He must meet that
truth with his own true stuff--with his own inborn strength. Principles?
Principles won't do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags--rags that would
fly off at the first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief. An
appeal to me in this fiendish row--is there? Very well; I hear; I admit,
but I have a voice too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that
cannot be silenced. Of course, a fool, what with sheer fright and fine
sentiments, is always safe. Who's that grunting? You wonder I didn't go
ashore for a howl and a dance? Well, no--I didn't. Fine sentiments, you
say? Fine sentiments, be hanged! I had no time. I had to mess about with
white-lead and strips of woolen blanket helping to put bandages on
those leaky steam-pipes--I tell you. I had to watch the steering, and
circumvent those snags, and get the tin-pot along by hook or by crook.
There was surface-truth enough in these things to save a wiser man. And
between whiles I had to look after the savage who was fireman. He was
an improved specimen; he could fire up a vertical boiler. He was there
below me, and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a
dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat, walking on his hind-legs.
A few months of training had done for that really fine chap. He squinted
at the steam-gauge and at the water-gauge with an evident effort of
intrepidity--and he had filed teeth too, the poor devil, and the wool of
his pate shaved into queer patterns, and three ornamental scars on each
of his cheeks. He ought to have been clapping his hands and stamping
his feet on the bank, instead of which he was hard at work, a thrall to
strange witchcraft, full of improving knowledge. He was useful because
he had been instructed; and what he knew was this--that should the water
in that transparent thing disappear, the evil spirit inside the boiler
would get angry through the greatness of his thirst, and take a terrible
vengeance. So he sweated and fired up and watched the glass fearfully
(with an impromptu charm, made of rags, tied to his arm, and a piece of
polished bone, as big as a watch, stuck flatways through his lower lip),
while the wooded banks slipped past us slowly, the short noise was left
behind, the interminable miles of silence--and we crept on, towards
Kurtz. But the snags were thick, the water was treacherous and shallow,
the boiler seemed indeed to have a sulky devil in it, and thus neither
that fireman nor I had any time to peer into our creepy thoughts.

"Some fifty miles below the Inner Station we came upon a hut of reeds,
an inclined and melancholy pole, with the unrecognizable tatters of
what had been a flag of some sort flying from it, and a neatly stacked
woodpile. This was unexpected. We came to the bank, and on the stack of
firewood found a flat piece of board with some faded pencil-writing
on it. When deciphered it said: 'Wood for you. Hurry up. Approach
cautiously. ' There was a signature, but it was illegible--not
Kurtz--a much longer word. 'Hurry up. ' Where? Up the river? 'Approach
cautiously. ' We had not done so. But the warning could not have been
meant for the place where it could be only found after approach.
Something was wrong above. But what--and how much? That was the
question. We commented adversely upon the imbecility of that telegraphic
style. The bush around said nothing, and would not let us look very far,
either. A torn curtain of red twill hung in the doorway of the hut, and
flapped sadly in our faces. The dwelling was dismantled; but we could
see a white man had lived there not very long ago. There remained a rude
table--a plank on two posts; a heap of rubbish reposed in a dark corner,
and by the door I picked up a book. It had lost its covers, and the
pages had been thumbed into a state of extremely dirty softness; but the
back had been lovingly stitched afresh with white cotton thread, which
looked clean yet.