Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad (novels in english txt) đ
- Author: Joseph Conrad
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âI 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 didnât do badly either, since I managed not to sink that steamboat on my first trip. Itâs 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 thatâs supposed to float all the time under his care is the unpardonable sin. No one may know of it, but you never forget the thumpâ âeh? A blow on the very heart. You remember it, you dream of it, you wake up at night and think of itâ âyears afterâ âand go hot and cold all over. I donât 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 fellowsâ âcannibalsâ âin 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 stavesâ âall 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 tumbledown hovel, with great gestures of joy and surprise and welcome, seemed very strangeâ âhad the appearance of being held there captive by a spell. The word ivory would ring in the air for a whileâ âand 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, that feeling. After all, if you were small, the grimy beetle crawled onâ âwhich was just what you wanted it to do. Where the pilgrims imagined it crawled to I donât know. To some place where they expected to get something. I bet! For me it crawled towards Kurtzâ âexclusively; but when the steam-pipes started leaking we crawled very slow. The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness. It was very quiet there. At night sometimes the roll of drums behind the curtain of trees would run up the river and remain sustained faintly, as if hovering in the air high over our heads, till the first break of day. Whether it meant war, peace, or prayer we could not tell. The dawns were heralded by the descent of a chill stillness; the woodcutters slept, their fires burned low; the snapping of a twig would make you start. We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil. But suddenly, as we struggled round a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage. The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming usâ âwho could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember because we were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a signâ âand no memories.
âThe earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but thereâ âthere you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men wereâ âNo, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of itâ âthis suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanityâ âlike yoursâ âthe thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which youâ âyou so remote from the night of first agesâ âcould comprehend. And why not? The mind of man is capable of anythingâ âbecause everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valour, rageâ âwho can tell?â âbut truthâ âtruth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and shudderâ âthe man knows, and can look on without a wink. But he must at least be as much of
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