than
enough. And I was right, too. A voice. He was very little more than a
voice. And I heard--him--it--this voice--other voices--all of them were
so little more than voices--and the memory of that time itself lingers
around me, impalpable, like a dying vibration of one immense jabber,
silly, atrocious, sordid, savage, or simply mean, without any kind of
sense. Voices, voices--even the girl herself--now--"

He was silent for a long time.

"I laid the ghost of his gifts at last with a lie," he began suddenly.
"Girl! What? Did I mention a girl? Oh, she is out of it--completely.
They--the women, I mean--are out of it--should be out of it. We must
help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own, lest ours
gets worse. Oh, she had to be out of it. You should have heard the
disinterred body of Mr. Kurtz saying, 'My Intended.' You would have
perceived directly then how completely she was out of it. And the lofty
frontal bone of Mr. Kurtz! They say the hair goes on growing sometimes,
but this--ah specimen, was impressively bald. The wilderness had patted
him on the head, and, behold, it was like a ball--an ivory ball; it had
caressed him, and--lo!--he had withered; it had taken him, loved him,
embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed
his soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish
initiation. He was its spoiled and pampered favorite. Ivory? I should
think so. Heaps of it, stacks of it. The old mud shanty was bursting
with it. You would think there was not a single tusk left either above
or below the ground in the whole country. 'Mostly fossil,' the manager
had remarked disparagingly. It was no more fossil than I am; but they
call it fossil when it is dug up. It appears these niggers do bury
the tusks sometimes--but evidently they couldn't bury this parcel
deep enough to save the gifted Mr. Kurtz from his fate. We filled the
steamboat with it, and had to pile a lot on the deck. Thus he could
see and enjoy as long as he could see, because the appreciation of this
favor had remained with him to the last. You should have heard him say,
'My ivory.' Oh yes, I heard him. 'My Intended, my ivory, my station, my
river, my--' everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in
expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into a prodigious peal of
laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places. Everything
belonged to him--but that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he