Heart of Darkness

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 I had time to think over certain curious queries which rose, and would not down, in my breast. I had for some time been steeped in the romance of voyage; I had been making rivers for the best part of my life, and was pretty well grounded in the traditions and legend of the sea. We were of course going to tell yarns about adventures, and by slow degrees there grew up in me a craving to be among men again, to hear the yarns and tell some, and to look at the sea.

At that time my memory is full of the strange things which I have seen, and I want to tell one of them now. It began, as the majority of such stories do, with a lying-in-the-dark sort of feeling that something was wrong. There was a mystery about it. My friend, the captain, a solid, pale man, with a face like a clenched fist, sat at the stern and smoked thoughtfully. The others lay huddled under the awning, and the boat was swinging slowly with the tide.

The big Buttocks of the land closed round upon us, and the river narrowed, and then we entered the immense width of a forest-track, and slowly felt our way among the trunks. The sun went down: a heavy, sluggish heat settled upon the water. The great river, brown with its own muddy life, rolled on, and the bank on either side was a wall of sombre vegetation. Nothing moved but the boat and the gulls which fluttered and screamed above us.

I remember the point when I first heard of him. We talked little then; the men's voices were low, and there was that kind of hush that comes over the deck of a ship in a tropical night. The captain's eyes were fixed upon the horizon; now and then he would glance at the figure of the manager, a pale, saturnine man who had come out in charge of a concern dealing in ivory. The talk drifted to business, to the difficulties of navigation here, to the folly of those who went in for wild adventure.

He was said to have gone into the depths of the country and to have become something like a god among the savages. They spoke of him in whispers, with the kind of awed admiration reserved for a man who had dared everything and had triumphed. Yet there was something in their tone that suggested a half-contemptuous wonder — as if they could not entirely trust the being about whom they spoke. He had a name that made men uneasy when it was pronounced.

I had not thought of him much before; my own brain was full of the river and of its oppressive infinite sameness. But at last the name recurred, and I found myself listening. The captain, with a slow movement of the head, pointed toward the interior, where, as he said, 'they say he lives like a god among the natives.' There was the usual mixture of admiration and horror in the voice of the speaker. The man, Kurtz, seemed to combine in himself all the powers of a leader.

The night closed over us, and the little yawl rocked upon the tide as if it were a toy. I lay and stared at the blackness, thinking of the vague things that the men had muttered. The forest pressed in close; a hum of insects filled the air; from a far-off shore came the cry of some animal. It was as if we had drawn near to the heart of an immense, sleeping beast. I could not shake off a certain feeling of nervous expectation that something out of the common was going to happen.