HEART OF DARKNESS
I

The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without
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 motionless over the biggest,
and the greatest, town on earth.

The Director of Companies was our captain and our host.  We four
affectionately watched his back as he stood in the bows looking to seaward.
On the whole 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 somewhere, 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 complexion, 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 meditative, 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 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 untitled--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 Greenwich, 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 lighthouse, 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 monstrous 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 mysterious 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 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 conquerors, 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, aggravated 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,