Heart of Darkness FreedomRead Classic Book

The *Nellie* swung to her anchor in the Thames estuary, and we waited for the turn of the tide. The sun was setting, and the waterway before us, which had borne the dreams of men and the germs of empires, grew somber. The air was still, meditative. It was then that Marlow, who still followed the sea, spoke suddenly from his cross-legged pose against the mizzen-mast. "And this also," he said, "has been one of the dark places of the earth." He was thinking of old times, when the Romans first came, feeling the savagery close around them - the mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. "The conquest of the earth," he mused, "is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only." And after a long silence, he began his tale.

It started with a map. As a boy, I had a passion for the blank spaces, and one, in the heart of Africa, shaped like an immense snake, had charmed me. Years later, no longer blank but a place of darkness, it called to me still. Through an aunt's connections, I secured a post as a river-steamboat captain for the Company, replacing a man named Fresleven, who had been killed in a squabble over two black hens. I traveled to a city that always reminded me of a whited sepulcher to sign my contract. In the Company's offices, two women knitted black wool, guarding the door of Darkness, and a strange doctor measured my head, asking if there was any madness in my family and warning me to keep calm. "In the tropics," he said, lifting a finger, "one must before everything keep calm."

The voyage down the coast was a surreal passage along the edge of an immense, dark-green jungle. We passed trading posts with farcical names and landed soldiers at forsaken-looking settlements. Once, we came upon a man-of-war, anchored in the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, firing its guns into a continent. "There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding," I recall. When I finally reached the mouth of the great river, I journeyed to the Company's first station. It was a scene of inhabited devastation. I saw a chain-gang of black men, connected by iron collars, toiling with the deathlike indifference of unhappy savages. I stumbled upon a grove of trees, a gloomy circle of some Inferno, where the sick and starving workers had crawled away to die, nothing but black shadows of disease. It was there, amidst the chaos, that I first heard the name of the man who is so indissolubly connected with my memories of that time. The Company's chief accountant, a miracle of starched collars and clean linen, mentioned him. "In the interior," he said, "you will no doubt meet Mr. Kurtz. . . . He is a very remarkable person."

After a two-hundred-mile tramp through a silent, depopulated land, I reached the Central Station, a place of aimless wandering and imbecile rapacity. There, I was informed my steamboat had sunk. The manager, a common trader whose most remarkable quality was an unnerving smile and the fact that he never got ill, greeted me with hollow pleasantries. He spoke of Mr. Kurtz with a strange anxiety, calling him the best agent, an exceptional man. The station was rife with intrigue, a place where sixteen or twenty faithless pilgrims waited for a chance to get a post in the ivory country. I met a young agent, a brickmaker with no straw, who called Kurtz an "emissary of pity, and science, and progress." He had painted a small sketch of a blindfolded woman carrying a lighted torch against a somber background. The effect was sinister. It seemed I was fated to hear about Kurtz, this prodigy, this voice, long before I would ever meet him.

The journey upriver was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, penetrating deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness. The great silence of the primeval forest was unnerving; it was not a peace, but the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth. Sometimes we glimpsed the natives on the shore - a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of eyes rolling. We could not understand. We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings, gliding past like phantoms. The worst of it was the suspicion of their not being inhuman, the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. I had no time for such reflections. I had to keep the steamboat afloat, to watch the steering, to find wood for the boiler. There was surface-truth enough in these things to save a wiser man.

About fifty miles below the Inner Station, we were enveloped in a blinding white fog. From the unseen shore rose a cry of infinite desolation, a tumultuous and mournful uproar that stopped as suddenly as it began. Two hours after the fog lifted, the attack came. Arrows flew from the dense bush. The pilgrims fired their Winchesters wildly into the trees. My helmsman, a fool from a coast tribe, dropped the wheel to fire a rifle and was struck down by a spear, falling at my feet. The spear had gone in out of sight; my shoes were full of his blood. As he died, his lustrous and inquiring glance enveloped me, a claim of distant kinship affirmed in a supreme moment. My immediate thought was one of extreme disappointment. Kurtz must be dead, too. I had traveled all this way for the sole purpose of talking with him. The man had presented himself to me as a voice, and now I would never hear him.

But he was alive. We reached his station to find a scene of ruin presided over by a young Russian with a beardless, boyish face, dressed in clothes covered in bright patches, like a harlequin. He spoke of Kurtz with a kind of severe exaltation. "You don't talk with that man - you listen to him," he said. "He has enlarged my mind." He told me how Kurtz had raided the country for ivory, how the tribes adored him, how he presided over unspeakable rites. Then, through my binoculars, I saw them: the round knobs on the posts of a ruined fence were not ornamental. They were the shrunken, dried heads of rebels, turned to face the house. The wilderness had found Kurtz out, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance. It had whispered to him things about himself he did not know, and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating, because he was hollow at the core.

They brought him out on a stretcher, an animated image of death carved out of old ivory. His voice, however, was still profound, vibrating. From the shore, a savage and superb woman, draped in fringed cloths and barbarous ornaments, watched us, her face a mask of wild sorrow. That night, I discovered Kurtz crawling on all fours back to the camp, drawn by the throb of drums and the drone of weird incantations. I had to confront him, not with force, but by appealing to his own exalted and incredible degradation. His soul was mad. The journey downriver was a race against death. The shade of the original Kurtz, the man of lofty expression and noble ideas, haunted the bedside of the hollow sham. He gave me his papers, and one evening, as I entered his cabin, I saw on his ivory face an expression of somber pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror - and of intense and hopeless despair. He cried out in a whisper at some image, some vision. "The horror! The horror!" And then the voice was gone.

I myself wrestled with death, but I returned to the sepulchral city. I was left with his memory and his Intended. I went to see her in a lofty drawing-room that grew darker with every word spoken. She lived in a beautiful world of her own, and for her, he had died only yesterday, a man of vast plans and noble heart. Her faith in him was an unearthly glow in the triumphant darkness from which I could not defend her. "I want something to live with," she pleaded, asking for his last words. I looked at her, at the great and saving illusion that shone on her pale forehead. I could not tell her the truth. It would have been too dark - too dark altogether. "The last word he pronounced," I said, "was - your name."