Heart of Darkness

Marlow crosses the Channel to sign his contract in a city that always makes him think of “a whited sepulchre”—Brussels, though it’s never named. The Company’s offices sit in a silent street of tall, shuttered houses with grass between the stones. In the outer room two women, one fat and one slim, are knitting black wool. Later Marlow will picture them guarding the door of Darkness, sizing up each cheery young recruit with unconcerned old eyes; not half of those they look at, he says, ever come back. A pale, plump great man shakes his hand for about forty-five seconds. A shabby old doctor measures Marlow’s skull with calipers “in the interests of science,” asks whether there is any madness in the family, and remarks that the changes take place inside. His aunt, triumphant, talks about weaning the ignorant millions from their horrid ways; when Marlow hints that the Company is run for profit, she reminds him brightly that the labourer is worthy of his hire.

He sails on a French steamer that crawls down the West African coast, dropping soldiers and customs clerks beside tin sheds in the wilderness. Off one empty stretch of shore a French warship is lobbing shells into the bush at a hidden camp of “enemies,” firing into a continent; nothing happens, because nothing could. The whole voyage feels, he says, like “a weary pilgrimage amongst hints for nightmares.”

After more than thirty days he reaches the mouth of the great river, and a gloomy Swedish captain drops him at the Company’s first station. It’s a hillside of wreckage: a boiler wallowing in the grass, an upturned railway truck, a cliff being blasted for a railway though it’s not in the way of anything. Six African men file past, chained neck to neck by iron collars, carrying baskets of earth; they are called criminals. Marlow ducks into the shade of some trees and finds he has stepped into “the gloomy circle of some Inferno.” Labourers brought from the coast on contracts, now starving and diseased, have crawled here to die. A boy, hardly more than a child, wears a scrap of white worsted round his neck. Helpless, Marlow gives him a ship’s biscuit.

Then, at the station, a vision: the Company’s chief accountant, in a high starched collar, white cuffs and snowy trousers, hair oiled, pen behind his ear. Marlow half admires the man’s linen as a feat of character in a demoralized land (a local woman has been taught to starch it; she had “a distaste for the work”). He keeps his books in apple-pie order while a sick agent lies groaning beside his desk, and complains that the groans make it hard to avoid clerical errors. It’s from him that Marlow first hears the name of Mr. Kurtz: a first-class agent deep in the ivory country, who sends in as much ivory as all the others put together. “Oh, he will go far, very far.”

Next comes a two-hundred-mile march with sixty carriers through emptied country: abandoned villages, a dead porter lying in the long grass, and a man with a bullet hole in his forehead.

At the Central Station, Marlow learns that his steamer is lying on the bottom of the river. Two days before he arrived it had been rushed upstream with the manager aboard and a volunteer skipper at the helm, and had its bottom torn out on the rocks. Fishing it out and rebuilding it will take months. The manager is utterly ordinary to look at; his one gift is that he never falls ill. He inspires neither love nor fear, only uneasiness, and once said that men who come out here should have no entrails. He seems oddly certain the repairs will take about three months. Much later, Marlow wonders whether the wreck was an accident at all.

The station is a farce. White agents—Marlow calls them pilgrims—drift about with long staves, plotting for posts where ivory can be had. The word “ivory” hangs in the air as if they were praying to it. When a shed of trade goods burns down, one man fights the fire with a bucket that has a hole in it, and an African accused of starting it is beaten until he screams. A young agent with a forked beard, whose job is making bricks (there isn’t a brick in the place), pumps Marlow for news from Europe and shows him a small oil painting by Kurtz: a blindfolded woman carrying a lighted torch against a dark background. Kurtz, he says, is “a prodigy,” an “emissary of pity and science and progress,” sure to rise. Deciding Marlow belongs to Kurtz’s powerful “gang of virtue,” he grows nervous—and Marlow, who says he hates lies, lets him believe it.

All Marlow wants is rivets. There are cases of them at the coast and none here, and without them the steamer can’t be patched. He and the foreman, a boiler-maker who adores pigeons, dance a jig on the iron deck at the thought that rivets are coming. They don’t. Instead arrives the Eldorado Exploring Expedition, a gang of treasure-hunters on donkeys led by the manager’s uncle. One evening, dozing on deck, Marlow overhears the two of them talking below him. Kurtz is a rival, backed by powerful people in Europe; he once set off downriver with his ivory and then turned back alone toward his empty station; he has been ill. Perhaps the climate will solve the problem. Anything, the uncle says, can be done in this country.

It takes two months to reach Kurtz. Going up that river, Marlow says, was like travelling back to the beginnings of the world. The forest is vast, silent and watchful; the little steamer crawls along the bank like a beetle; drums sound at night; now and then a village bursts into shouting and dancing on the shore. Marlow insists, uneasily, that the people he glimpses are not inhuman—what thrills and frightens him is the thought of his “remote kinship” with them—but he keeps his own head by minding the surface: snags, leaking steam-pipes, firewood. His crew of African wood-cutters, whom he calls cannibals, are paid in useless lengths of brass wire and are visibly starving, yet though they outnumber the white men thirty to five, they never turn on them. Their restraint astonishes him.

Fifty miles below Kurtz’s station they find a stack of firewood with a note—“Wood for you. Hurry up. Approach cautiously.”—and a battered old manual of seamanship scribbled with what look like notes in cipher. Eight miles from the station a thick white fog pins them in midstream, and from the bank comes a great cry that Marlow hears as grief. When the fog lifts and they push on, arrows pour out of the bush. The pilgrims fire wildly from the hip. The helmsman, a young man from the coast trained by Fresleven, drops the wheel, flings open the shutter and fires a rifle into the trees—and is speared in the side. He dies at Marlow’s feet, looking up at him with a gaze Marlow will never forget. Marlow scatters the attackers with blasts of the steam whistle, then, his shoes full of blood, flings them overboard.

He’s sure Kurtz must be dead too, and is crushed: he realizes he’d imagined Kurtz not as a man of action but as a voice. Here Marlow tells his friends what he learned later. Kurtz—half-English mother, half-French father; “All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz”—wrote a soaring seventeen-page report for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs. At its foot, scrawled in an unsteady hand, is a postscript: “Exterminate all the brutes!” Marlow tips the helmsman’s body into the river, partly so that the hungry crew won’t eat it.

Round the next bend lies Kurtz’s station, and on the bank a young man in clothes patched all over in blue, red and yellow, like a harlequin, beckons them in. He’s a Russian, the son of an arch-priest, twenty-five years old, who has wandered alone on the river for two years out of sheer love of adventure. The manual was his, and the “cipher” is Russian. He worships Kurtz. “You don’t talk with that man—you listen to him.” Kurtz, he says, has enlarged his mind. Bit by bit the truth slips out. Kurtz ran out of trade goods and raided the country for ivory with guns; the tribe by the lake adored him; he once threatened to shoot the Russian over a small lot of ivory. Then Marlow turns his binoculars on what he took for carved knobs on the posts near the house. They are human heads, drying on stakes, all but one turned toward Kurtz’s windows. The Russian protests that they were rebels.

Kurtz is carried out on a stretcher, a skeleton who “looked at least seven feet long,” and a crowd of armed men pours out of the forest until he speaks to them and they melt away again. On the bank appears a magnificent African woman, hung with brass and glass beads, who faces the steamer and flings her arms up to the sky. The manager murmurs that Kurtz’s method is “unsound” and has ruined the district for trade; Marlow, sickened more by the manager than by Kurtz, sides with Kurtz and finds himself written off as unsound too. The Russian, told that the manager would like him hanged, confides that Kurtz ordered the attack on the steamer to scare them off, then slips away into the night with a pair of Marlow’s old shoes.

At midnight Kurtz’s cabin is empty. Marlow follows a trail through the wet grass and finds him crawling toward the fires and drums of his worshippers. There is nothing high or low, Marlow says, that he can appeal to in this man; Kurtz has kicked himself loose of the earth. What works is fear for himself. “You will be lost,” Marlow tells him, “utterly lost.” He helps Kurtz back to the boat. The man weighs hardly more than a child.

Next day they leave, with Kurtz on a couch in the pilot-house. The crowd floods the shore and the woman cries out. When the pilgrims reach for their rifles, Marlow scatters the people with the whistle—all but the woman, who stands her ground with her arms stretched after them—and the pilgrims fire anyway. Downstream, Kurtz’s magnificent voice runs on to the last, full of “My Intended, my station, my career, my ideas.” He gives Marlow a packet of papers and a photograph to keep out of the manager’s hands. One night, by candlelight, Marlow sees pride, power, terror and despair cross his face, and hears him cry out in a whisper, “The horror! The horror!” Marlow goes in to dinner. The manager’s servant puts his head round the door: “Mistah Kurtz—he dead.” Next day the pilgrims bury him in a muddy hole.

Marlow nearly dies of fever himself, and comes out of it convinced that Kurtz was a remarkable man after all. “He had something to say. He said it.” His cry was a judgement, Marlow decides, a kind of moral victory.

Back in the sepulchral city, sick and contemptuous of everyone around him, he fends off a Company man who wants Kurtz’s papers (Marlow hands over the report with its postscript torn off), a cousin who says Kurtz was a great musician, and a journalist who says he could have led an extreme party—any party. More than a year after the death, Marlow calls on Kurtz’s Intended, a pale woman in black who still worships her fiancé. She begs for his last words. The dusk around them seems to whisper them back. Marlow, who has told us he hates a lie, tells her: “The last word he pronounced was—your name.” She weeps in triumph. The truth, he says, would have been “too dark—too dark altogether.”

On the Nellie, nobody moves. The Director remarks that they have lost the first of the ebb. The narrator looks up: the Thames, that “waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth,” seems to flow into the heart of an immense darkness.

After a two-hundred-mile march Marlow reaches the Central Station to find his steamer sunk, possibly on purpose. The manager, a man of chilling ordinariness, resents Kurtz as a rival; the other agents, whom Marlow calls pilgrims, scheme for ivory and do nothing. For months he can’t get the rivets to mend his boat, though there are cases of them at the coast. Lying on deck one night, he overhears the manager and his uncle hoping the climate will finish Kurtz off: anything, they agree, can be done in this country. When at last he heads upriver, it’s like travelling back to the beginning of the world: vast silent forest, drums at night, and a starving African crew who amaze him by never turning on the white men. Near Kurtz’s station, after a blinding fog, the steamer is attacked from the bush and Marlow’s African helmsman is killed by a spear. Marlow later learns that Kurtz once wrote a soaring report on civilizing Africa—with a postscript scrawled at the bottom: “Exterminate all the brutes!”

At the station a cheerful young Russian in a patchwork suit, Kurtz’s devoted disciple, admits that Kurtz has raided the country for ivory and let the local people worship him. The knobs on the fence posts turn out to be human heads, drying on stakes and turned toward Kurtz’s windows. The manager’s only complaint is that Kurtz’s method is “unsound” and bad for trade. Kurtz, dying, is carried aboard; a magnificent African woman stands on the bank; that night Kurtz crawls off toward his worshippers’ fires and Marlow brings him back. On the voyage downstream Kurtz talks grandly of his career, then, by candlelight, whispers his last words: “The horror! The horror!” Marlow, who nearly dies of fever himself, returns to Europe and visits Kurtz’s fiancée, his Intended, who begs to hear his final words. Unable to break her faith, Marlow lies: Kurtz died saying her name. On the Thames, the river seems to run into the heart of an immense darkness.