heart of darkness chapter 3

I lived in an infernal mess of rust, filings, nuts, bolts, spanners, hammers, ratchet-drills -- things I abominate, because I don't get on with them.

There he was before me, in motley, as though he had absconded from a troupe of mimes, enthusiastic, fabulous.

I could not hear a sound, but through my glasses I saw the thin arm extended commandingly, the lower jaw moving, the eyes of that apparition shining darkly far in its bony head that nodded with grotesque jerks.

His ascendancy was extraordinary.

A clean-shaved man, with an official manner and wearing gold-rimmed spectacles, called on me one day and made inquiries, at first circuitous, afterwards suavely pressing, about what he was pleased to denominate certain 'documents.'

I was circumventing Kurtz as though it had been a boyish game.

Droll thing life is -- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose.

There was an eddy in the mass of human bodies, and the woman with helmeted head and tawny cheeks rushed out to the very brink of the stream.

However, he had enough strength in him -- factitious no doubt -- to very nearly make an end of us, as you shall hear directly.

It came to him, and he accepted it with a sort of eager fatalism.

And in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and

I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams.

Their glance was guileless, profound, confident, and trustful.

It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary.

This lasted of course the merest fraction of a second, and then the usual sense of commonplace, deadly danger, the possibility of a sudden onslaught and massacre, or something of the kind, which I saw impending, was positively welcome and composing.

He lived then before me; he lived as much as he had ever lived -- a shadow insatiable of splendid appearances, of frightful realities; a shadow darker than the shadow of the night, and draped nobly in the folds of a gorgeous eloquence.

She stood looking at us without a stir, and like the wilderness itself, with an air of brooding over an inscrutable purpose.

I returned deliberately to the first I had seen -- and there it was,


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black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids -- a head that seemed to sleep at the top

I was struck by the fire of his eyes and the composed languor of his expression.

When we came abreast again, they faced the river, stamped their feet, nodded their horned heads, swayed their scarlet bodies; they shook towards the fierce river-demon a bunch of black feathers, a mangy skin with a pendent tail -- something that looked a dried gourd; they shouted periodically together strings of amazing words that resembled no sounds of human language; and




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the deep murm...

When we came abreast again, they faced the river, stamped their feet, nodded their horned heads, swayed their scarlet bodies; they shook towards the fierce river-demon a bunch of black feathers, a mangy skin with a pendent tail -- something that lo

'This noxious fool' (meaning the manager) 'is capable of prying into my boxes when I am not looking.'

The




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knitting old woman with the cat obtruded herself upon my memory as a most improper person to be sitting at the other end of such an affair.

Instantly, in the emptiness of the landscape, a cry arose whose shrillness pierced the still air like a sharp arrow flying straight to the very heart of the land; and, as if by enchantment, streams of human beings -- of




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naked human beings -- with spears in their hands, with bows, with shields, with wild glances and savage movements, were poured into the clearing by the dark-faced and

His need was to exist, and to move onwards at the greatest possible risk, and with a maximum of privation.

This shadow looked satiated and calm, as though for the moment it had had its fill of all the emotions.

Suddenly the manager's boy put his insolent black head in the doorway, and said in a tone of scathing contempt:

"'Mistah Kurtz -- he dead.'

The shade of the original Kurtz frequented the bedside of the hollow sham, whose fate it was to be buried presently in the mould of primeval earth.

It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary.

Glamour urged him on, glamour kept him unscathed.