me at
my monkey tricks, just as it watches you fellows performing on your
respective tight-ropes for--what is it? half-a-crown a tumble--"

"Try to be civil, Marlow," growled a voice, and I knew there was at
least one listener awake besides myself.

"I beg your pardon. I forgot the heartache which makes up the rest of
the price. And indeed what does the price matter, if the trick be well
done? You do your tricks very well. And I didn't do badly either, since
I managed not to sink that steamboat on my first trip. It's a wonder to
me yet. Imagine a blindfolded man set to drive a van over a bad road.
I sweated and shivered over that business considerably, I can tell
you. After all, for a seaman, to scrape the bottom of the thing that's
supposed to float all the time under his care is the unpardonable sin.
No one may know of it, but you never forget the thump--eh? A blow on the
very heart. You remember it, you dream of it, you wake up at night and
think of it--years after--and go hot and cold all over. I don't pretend
to say that steamboat floated all the time. More than once she had to
wade for a bit, with twenty cannibals splashing around and pushing.
We had enlisted some of these chaps on the way for a crew. Fine
fellows--cannibals--in their place. They were men one could work with,
and I am grateful to them. And, after all, they did not eat each other
before my face: they had brought along a provision of hippo-meat
which went rotten, and made the mystery of the wilderness stink in my
nostrils. Phoo! I can sniff it now. I had the manager on board and three
or four pilgrims with their staves--all complete. Sometimes we came upon
a station close by the bank, clinging to the skirts of the unknown, and
the white men rushing out of a tumble-down hovel, with great gestures of
joy and surprise and welcome, seemed very strange,--had the appearance
of being held there captive by a spell. The word ivory would ring in
the air for a while--and on we went again into the silence, along empty
reaches, round the still bends, between the high walls of our
winding way, reverberating in hollow claps the ponderous beat of the
stern-wheel. Trees, trees, millions of trees, massive, immense, running
up high; and at their foot, hugging the bank against the stream, crept
the little begrimed steamboat, like a sluggish beetle crawling on the
floor of a lofty portico. It made you feel very small, very lost, and
yet it was not altogether depressing