Page 94 - HEART OF DARKNESS

Heart of Darkness

back deafened me. I glanced over my shoulder, and the
pilot-house was yet full of noise and smoke when I made a
dash at the wheel. The fool-nigger had dropped
everything, to throw the shutter open and let off that

Martini-Henry. He stood before the wide opening,
glaring, and I yelled at him to come back, while I
straightened the sudden twist out of that steamboat. There
was no room to turn even if I had wanted to, the snag was
somewhere very near ahead in that confounded smoke,
there was no time to lose, so I just crowded her into the
bank— right into the bank, where I knew the water was
deep.
‘We tore slowly along the overhanging bushes in a
whirl of broken twigs and flying leaves. The fusillade
below stopped short, as I had foreseen it would when the
squirts got empty. I threw my head back to a glinting
whizz that traversed the pilot-house, in at one shutter-hole
and out at the other. Looking past that mad helmsman,
who was shaking the empty rifle and yelling at the shore, I
saw vague forms of men running bent double, leaping,
gliding, distinct, incomplete, evanescent. Something big
appeared in the air before the shutter, the rifle went
overboard, and the man stepped back swiftly, looked at
me over his shoulder in an extraordinary, profound,

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