The story is narrated by Marlow to a company gathered on a yawl near Gravesend, waiting for the turn of the tide, so that we are told: "The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway"- as in fact it is. "the venerable stream" is evoked in all its immemorial association- and then Marlow's voice breaks as it were the silence in which we are contemplating the spectacle. This also, he says, has been one of the dark places of the earth, and he sketches its effect upon some young Roman legionary:

He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination- you know, imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.

Marlow goes on to tell the story of Kurtz. We learn how Marlow, commissioned to command a river steamer far up the Congo, crawls towards the equator in a French coasting steamer. The tropics thrust out at him, with increasing force, intimations of their power to disintegrate and corrupt the standards and the very consciousness of culture:

Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn't even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. It appears the French had one of their wars going on thereabouts. Her ensign dropped limp like a rag; the muzzles of the long six-inch guns stuck out all over the low hull; the greasy, slimy swell swung her up lazily and let her down, swaying her thin masts. In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent.

Then comes the voyage up the river and Marlow's arrival at the trading station. A crazy railway is being built. Mercilessly exploited native labourers are dying of disease or starvation in utter neglect. In the heart of this savage wilderness there is being carried on a ghastly and futile travesty of a developing material civilization. This is the environment within which Kurt< is discovered. He stands at the end of an ascending series of corrupting nightmares-and his reputation is that of a prodigy of benevolence and enlightenment, an isolated civilizing genius in charge of an upper station. He is abhorred and feared by his fellow-traders, who intrigue and slander and hate each other in their mad scramble for ivory, and who have in fact succeeded in isolating him for months in the hope that the climate will dill him. The first section of the story ends with Marlow curious "to see whether this man, who had come out equipped with moral ideas of some sort, would climb to the top after all and how he would set about his work when there".

But Kurtz has become depraved and perverted beyond description-this while still able to awe with a hollow eloquence full of the loftiest moral idealism the simple young Russian who in his only white associate. The first intimation of the state of the case is the weird and passionate behaviour of the natives when they believe that Kurtz is to be taken away from them. These negroes- simply glimpsed in the grip of their inexplicable emotions, or heard in a loud cry as of infinite desolation soaring slowly in the opaque air-are altogether more convincing than the Malays within whose skin Conrad had supposed he could insert himself in the Islands novels and stories. Kurtz has become a god, the centre and recipient of unspeakable rites. Mortally ill, he is brought on board ship. He escapes on hands and knees, crawling painfully back to the darkness that has enslaved him. Then he is secured again and the steamer sails with him:

Somewhere the uncorrupted man lurks in Kurtz, a judging presence. And he acknowledges the horor with his last breath:

Marlow returns to the mean and predatory scoundrels whom it is his business to ferry up and down the nightmare river:

The story concludes with a brief epilogue in which Marlow tells of his being constrained to visit the woman to whom Kurtz had been betrothed. She is utterly trusting and believing, living under the spell still of his hollow, easily eloquent idealism. She insists on knowing what were his last words. And Marlow says that Kurtz died pronouncing her name.

(8) ã Eight Modern Writers. J.I.M.Steward

Oxford History of English Literature

Edited by F.P. Wilson and banamy Dobrée

Oxford at the Clarendon Press

Oxford University Press.- 1963

Pages: 193, 194 and 195.

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