e was not
inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it
out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these
misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination
of moonshine.

His remark did not seem at all surprising. It was just like Marlow.
It was accepted in silence. No one took the trouble to grunt even; and
presently he said, very slow--

"I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here,
nineteen hundred years ago--the other day. . . . Light came out of this
river since--you say Knights? Yes; but it is like a running blaze on
a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the
flicker--may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But
darkness was here yesterday. Imagine the feelings of a commander of
a fine--what d'ye call 'em?--trireme in the Mediterranean, ordered
suddenly to the north; run overland across the Gauls in a hurry; put in
charge of one of these craft the legionaries,--a wonderful lot of handy
men they must have been too--used to build, apparently by the hundred,
in a month or two, if we may believe what we read. Imagine him here--the
very end of the world, a sea the color of lead, a sky the color of
smoke, a kind of ship about as rigid as a concertina--and going up this
river with stores, or orders, or what you like. Sandbanks, marshes,
forests, savages,--precious little to eat fit for a civilized man,
nothing but Thames water to drink. No Falernian wine here, no going
ashore. Here and there a military camp lost in a wilderness, like a
needle in a bundle of hay--cold, fog, tempests, disease, exile, and
death,--death skulking in the air, in the water, in the bush. They must
have been dying like flies here. Oh yes--he did it. Did it very well,
too, no doubt, and without thinking much about it either, except
afterwards to brag of what he had gone through in his time, perhaps.
They were men enough to face the darkness. And perhaps he was cheered
by keeping his eye on a chance of promotion to the fleet at Ravenna
by-and-by, if he had good friends in Rome and survived the awful
climate. Or think of a decent young citizen in a toga--perhaps too
much dice, you know--coming out here in the train of some prefect, or
tax-gatherer, or trader even, to mend his fortunes. Land in a swamp,
march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the
utter savagery, had closed round him,--all that myster