Heart of Darkness | Page 4

to evoke the great
spirit of the past upon the lower reaches of the Thames. The tidal
current runs to and fro in its unceasing service, crowded with memories
of men and ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the battles of the
sea. It had known and served all the men of whom the nation is proud,
from Sir Francis Drake to Sir John Franklin, knights all, titled and
untitled--the great knights-errant of the sea. It had borne all the ships
whose names are like jewels flashing in the night of time, from the
Golden Hind returning with her round flanks full of treasure, to be
visited by the Queen's Highness and thus pass out of the gigantic tale,
to the Erebus and Terror, bound on other conquests-- and that never
returned. It had known the ships and the men. They had sailed from
Deptford, from Greenwich, from Erith-- the adventurers and the settlers;

kings' ships and the ships of men on `Change; captains, admirals, the
dark "interlopers" of the Eastern trade, and the commissioned
"generals" of East India fleets. Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame,
they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the
torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from
the sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river
into the mystery of an unknown earth! . . . The dreams of men, the seed
of commonwealths, the germs of empires.
The sun set; the dusk fell on the stream, and lights began to appear
along the shore. The Chapman lighthouse, a three-legged thing erect on
a mud-flat, shone strongly. Lights of ships moved in the fairway--a
great stir of lights going up and going down. And farther west on the
upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked
ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare
under the stars.
"And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark
places of the earth."
He was the only man of us who still "followed the sea." The worst that
could be said of him was that he did not represent his class. He was a
seaman, but he was a wanderer, too, while most seamen lead, if one
may so express it, a sedentary life. Their minds are of the stay-at-home
order, and their home is always with them--the ship; and so is their
country--the sea. One ship is very much like another, and the sea is
always the same. In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign
shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past,
veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance;
for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself,
which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny. For
the rest, after his hours of work, a casual stroll or a casual spree on
shore suffices to unfold for him the secret of a whole continent, and
generally he finds the secret not worth knowing. The yarns of seamen
have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the
shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to
spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not

inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out
only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty
halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of
moonshine.
His remark did not seem at all surprising. It was just like Marlow. It
was accepted in silence. No one took the trouble to grunt even; and
presently he said, very slow--
"I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here,
nineteen hundred years ago--the other day. . . . Light came out of this
river since--you say Knights? Yes; but it is like a running blaze on a
plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker--may
it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here
yesterday. Imagine the feelings of a commander of a fine--what d'ye
call `em?--trireme in the Mediterranean, ordered suddenly to the north;
run overland across the Gauls in a hurry; put in charge of one of these
craft the legionaries,--a wonderful lot of handy men they must have
been too--used to build, apparently by the hundred, in a month or two,
if we may believe what we read. Imagine him here-- the very end of the
world, a sea the color of lead, a sky the color of smoke,