Heart of Darknessfore Mr. Kurtz, he crawled as much as the veriest savage
of them all. I had no idea of the conditions, he said: these
heads were the heads of rebels. I shocked him excessively by
laughing. Rebels! What would be the next definition I was
to hear? There had been enemies, criminals, workers—and
these were rebels. Those rebellious heads looked very sub-
dued to me on their sticks. ‘You don’t know how such a life
tries a man like Kurtz,’ cried Kurtz’s last disciple. ‘Well, and
you?’ I said. ‘I! I! I am a simple man. I have no great thoughts.
I want nothing from anybody. How can you compare me to
... ?’ His feelings were too much for speech, and suddenly he
broke down. ‘I don’t understand,’ he groaned. ‘I’ve been do-
ing my best to keep him alive, and that’s enough. I had no
hand in all this. I have no abilities. There hasn’t been a drop
of medicine or a mouthful of invalid food for months here.
He was shamefully abandoned. A man like this, with such
ideas. Shamefully! Shamefully! I—I— haven’t slept for the
last ten nights ...’
‘His voice lost itself in the calm of the evening. The long
shadows of the forest had slipped downhill while we talked,
had gone far beyond the ruined hovel, beyond the symbolic
row of stakes. All this was in the gloom, while we down
there were yet in the sunshine, and the stretch of the river
abreast of the clearing glittered in a still and dazzling splen-
dour, with a murky and overshadowed bend above and
below. Not a living soul was seen on the shore. The bushes
did not rustle.
‘Suddenly round the corner of the house a group of men
appeared, as though they had come up from the ground.