at
the prospect of meeting Kurtz very soon. When I say very soon I mean
it comparatively. It was just two months from the day we left the creek
when we came to the bank below Kurtz's station.

"Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings
of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were
kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air
was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of
sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into
the gloom of overshadowed distances. On silvery sand-banks hippos and
alligators sunned themselves side by side. The broadening waters flowed
through a mob of wooded islands; you lost your way on that river as you
would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to
find the channel, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off for
ever from everything you had known once--somewhere--far away--in another
existence perhaps. There were moments when one's past came back to one,
as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare for yourself;
but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered
with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of
plants, and water, and silence. And this stillness of life did not in
the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force
brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful
aspect. I got used to it afterwards; I did not see it any more; I had no
time. I had to keep guessing at the channel; I had to discern, mostly by
inspiration, the signs of hidden banks; I watched for sunken stones; I
was learning to clap my teeth smartly before my heart flew out, when I
shaved by a fluke some infernal sly old snag that would have ripped the
life out of the tin-pot steamboat and drowned all the pilgrims; I had to
keep a lookout for the signs of dead wood we could cut up in the night
for next day's steaming. When you have to attend to things of that sort,
to the mere incidents of the surface, the reality--the reality, I tell
you--fades. The inner truth is hidden--luckily, luckily. But I felt it
all the same; I felt often its mysterious stillness watching 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