Page 68 - HEART OF DARKNESS

Heart of Darkness

‘In a few days the Eldorado Expedition went into the
patient wilderness, that closed upon it as the sea closes
over a diver. Long afterwards the news came that all the
donkeys were dead. I know nothing as to the fate of the

less valuable animals. They, no doubt, like the rest of us,
found what they deserved. I did not inquire. I was then
rather excited 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

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