06 - Chapter 3 - Part 2. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.

06 - Chapter 3 - Part 2. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.  
In this powerful novella based on Joseph Conrad's own experiences in the Belgian Congo, Charles Marlow, an experienced seaman, tells a small group of friends about a profoundly disturbing episode in his life where he was employed by a large colonising enterprise to sail a tinpot steamer up a river into the heart of Africa with a view to bringing out an ivory trader who had gone rogue. Conrad biographer Maya Janasoff has argued that while Marlow's descriptions of Africans are crudely racist, the author binds this racist language with "a potentially radical suggestion. What made the difference between savagery and civilization, Conrad was saying, transcended skin color; it even transcended place. The issue for Conrad wasn’t that 'savages' were inhuman. It was that any human could be a savage."

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Part two of chapter three of Heart of Darkness by
Joseph Conrad. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain.
Read by Bomnefeld. When next day we left at noon,
the crowd of whose presence behind the curtain of trees

(00:22):
I had been acutely conscious all the time, flowed out
of the woods again filled the clearing, covered the slope
with a mass of naked, breathing, quivering bronze bodies. I
steamed up a bit, then swung down stream, and two
thousand eyes followed the evolutions of the splashing, thumping, fierce

(00:43):
river Demon, beating the water with its terrible tail and
breathing black smoke into the air. In the front of
the first rank along the river, three men plastered with
bright bread earth from head to foot, strutted to and fro.
When we came abreast again, they faced the river, stamped

(01:04):
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 pendant tail, something
that looked a dry gourd. They shouted periodically together strings
of amazing words that resembled no sounds of human language,

(01:27):
and the deep murmurs of the crowd interrupted suddenly, were
like the responses of some satanic litany. We had carried
Kurts into the pilot house. There was more air there.
Lying on the couch, he stared through the open shudder.
There was an eddy in the mass of human bodies,

(01:48):
and the woman with helmeted head and tawny cheeks rushed
out to the very brink of the stream. She put
out her hands shouted something, and all that wild mob
took up the shots, a roaring chorus of articulated, rapid,
breathless utterance. Do you understand this, I asked. He kept

(02:10):
on looking out past me with fiery, longing eyes, with
a mingled expression of wistfulness and hate. He made no answer,
but I saw a smile, a smile of indefinable meaning,
appear on his colorless lips that a moment after twitched convulsively.
Do I not, he said, slowly, gasping as if the

(02:35):
words had been torn out of him by a supernatural power.
I pulled the string of the whistle, And I did
this because I saw the pilgrims on deck getting out
their rifles with an air of anticipating a jolly lark.
At the sudden screech, there was a movement of abject
terror through that wedged mass of bodies. Don't don't you

(02:59):
frighten them away? Cried some one on deck, disconsolately. I
pulled the string time after time. They broke and ran,
They leaped, they crouched, they swerved, they dodged the flying
terror of the sound. The three red chaps had fallen
flat face down on the shore, as though they had

(03:22):
been shot dead. Only the barbarous and superb woman did
not so much as flinch, and stretched tragically her bare
arms after us over the somber and glittering river. And
then that imbecile crowd down on the deck started their
little fun, and I could see nothing more for smoke.

(03:45):
The brown current ran swiftly out of the heart of darkness,
bearing us down towards the sea with twice the speed
of our upward progress. And Courtz's life was running swiftly too,
ebbing ebbing, out of his heart into the sea of
inexorable time. The manager was very placid, He had no

(04:06):
vital anxieties. Now he took us both in with a
comprehensive and satisfied glance. The affair had come off as
well as he could have wished. I saw the time
approaching when I would be left alone of the party
of unsound method. The pilgrims looked upon me with disfavor.

(04:27):
I was, so to speak, numbered with the dead. It
is strange how I accepted this unforeseen partnership, this choice
of nightmares forced upon me in the tenebrous land invaded
by these mean and greedy phantoms, Kurtz disgorsed a voice.

(04:48):
A voice it rang deep to the very last. It
survived his strength to hide in the magnificent folds of eloquence,
the barren darkness of his heart. Oh, he struggled, He struggled.
The wastes of his weary brain were haunted by shadowy images,

(05:10):
now images of wealth and fame, revolving obsequiously round his
unextinguishable gift of noble and lofty expression. My intended, my station,
my career, my ideas. These were the subjects for the
occasional utterances of elevated sentiments. The shade of the original

(05:31):
curts frequented the bedside of the hollow sham, whose fate
it was to be buried presently in the mold of
primeval earth. But both the diabolic love and the unearthly
hate of the mysteries it had penetrated, fought for the
possession of that soul, satiated of primitive emotions, avid of lying, fame,

(05:53):
of sham, distinction of all the appearances of success and power.
Sometimes he was contemptibly childish, a desire to have kings
meet him at railway stations on his return from some
ghastly nowhere where he intended to accomplish great things. You

(06:14):
show them that you have in you something it is
really profitable, and then there will be no limits to
the recognition of your ability. He would say. Of course,
you must take care of the motives, right motives. Always
the long reaches that were like one, and the same reach,
monotonous bends that were exactly alike, slipped past the steamer

(06:38):
with their multitude of secular trees, Looking patiently after this
grimy fragment of another world, the forerunner of change, of conquest,
of trade, of massacres of blessings, I looked ahead, piloting
close the shutter, said Curtz. Suddenly, one day I can't

(07:01):
bear to look at this I did so. There was
a silence. Oh but I will wring your heart yet,
he cried at the invisible wilderness. He broke down, as
I had expected, and had to lie up for repairs

(07:22):
at the head of an island. This delay was the
first thing that shook Kurtz's confidence. One morning, he gave
me a packet of papers and a photograph the lot,
tied together with a shoe string. Keep this for me,
he said, this noxious fool, meaning the manager is capable

(07:44):
of prying into my boxes when I'm not looking. In
the afternoon, I saw him. He was lying on his
back with closed eyes, and I withdrew quietly. But I
heard him mutter, live rightly, Die die. I listened. There

(08:06):
was nothing more. Was he rehearsing some speech in his sleep,
or was it a fragment of a phrase from some
newspaper article. He had been writing for the papers and
meant to do so again for the furthering of my ideas.
It's my duty. His was an impenetrable darkness. I looked

(08:29):
at him as you peered down at a man who
was lying at the bottom of a precipice where the
sun never shines. But I had not much time to
give him, because I was helping the engine driver to
take to pieces the leaky cylinders, to straighten a bent
connecting rod, and another such matters. I lived in an

(08:49):
infernal mess of rust, filings, nuts, bolts, spanners, hammers, ratchet drills,
things I abominate because I don't get on with them.
I tended the little forge we fortunately had a board.
I toiled wearily in a wretched scrap heap unless I

(09:10):
had the shakes too bad to stand. One evening, coming
in with a candle, I was startled to hear him say,
a little tremulously, I am lying here in the dark,
waiting for death. The light was within a foot of
his eyes. I forced myself to murmur, oh, nonsense, and

(09:35):
stood over him, as if transfixed anything approaching. The change
that came over his features I have never seen before
and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn't touched.
I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had

(09:55):
been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression
of somber pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror, of
an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again?
In every detail of desired temptation and surrender, during that

(10:16):
supreme moment of complete knowledge, he cried in a whisper
at some image, at some vision. He cried out twice,
a cry that was no more than a breath lo
horror theoror. I blew the candilots and left the cabin.

(10:43):
The pilgrims were dining in the mess room, and I
took my place opposite the manager, who lifted his eyes
to give me a questioning glance, which I successfully ignored.
He leaned back, serene with that peculiar smile of his,
sealing the unexpressed day laps of his meanness. A continuous

(11:03):
shower of small flies streamed upon the lamp, upon the cloth,
upon our hands and faces. Suddenly, the manager's boy put
his insolent black head in the doorway and said, in
a tone of scathing contempt, mister Kurtz he dead. All

(11:24):
the pilgrims rushed out to sea. I remained and went
on with my dinner. I believe I was considered brutally callous. However,
I did not eat much. There was a lamp in there, light,
don't you know, And outside it was so beastly, beastly dark,

(11:44):
I went no more near the remarkable man who had
pronounced a judgment upon the adventures of his soul on
this earth. The voice was gone. What else had been there?
But I am, of course aware that next day the
Pilgrims buried something in a muddy hole, and then they

(12:08):
very nearly buried me. However, as you see, I did
not go to join Kurtz there, and then I did not.
I remained to dream the nightmare after the end, and
to show my loyalty to Kurtz once more. Destiny, my destiny,

(12:31):
droll thing. Life is that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic
for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from
it is some knowledge of yourself that comes too late,
a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with death.
It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It

(12:55):
takes place in an impalpable grayness, with nothing under, with
nothing around, without spectators, without clamor, without glory, without the
great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat,
in a sickly atmosphere of tapid skepticism, without much belief
in your own right, and still less in that of

(13:17):
your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom,
then life is a greater riddle than some of us
think it to be. I was within a hair's breadth
of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with
humiliation that probably I would have nothing to say. This

(13:39):
is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz was a
remarkable man. He had something to say. He said it.
Since I had peeped over the edge myself, I understand
better the meaning of his stare that would not see
the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to
embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the

(14:02):
hearts that beat in the darkness. He had summed up,
he had judged the horror. He was a remarkable man,
after all. This was the expression of some sort of belief.
It had candor, It had conviction, It had a vibrating

(14:24):
note of revolt in its whisper. It had the appalling
face of a glimpsed truth, the strange commingling of desire
and hate. And it is not my own extremity. I
remember best a vision of grayness without form, filled with
physical pain, and a careless contempt, with the evanescence of

(14:45):
all things, even of this pain itself. Now it was
his extremity that I seemed to have lived through. True,
he had made that last stride, he had stepped over
the edge, when I had been permitted to drop back
my hesitating foot. And perhaps in this is the whole difference.

(15:09):
Perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity
are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in
which we step over the threshold of the invisible. Perhaps
I like to think my summing up would not have
been a word of careless contempt. Better his cry much better.

(15:34):
It was an affirmation, a moral victory, paid for by
innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfaction. But it
was a victory. That is why I have remained loyal
to Carts to the last and even beyond. When a

(15:54):
long time after I heard once more, not his own voice,
but the echo of his magnificent eloquence, thrown to me
from a soul as translucently pure as a cliff of crystal. No,
they did not bury me, though there is a period
of time which I remember mistily with a shuddering wonder,

(16:18):
like a passage through some inconceivable world that had no
hope in it, no desire. I found myself back in
the sepulchral city, presenting the sight of people hurrying through
the streets to filter little money from each other, to
devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to

(16:39):
dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts.
They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me
an irritating pretense, because I felt so sure they could
not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, which

(17:00):
which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about
their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive
to me, like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the
face of a danger. It is unable to comprehend. I
had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had
some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces.

(17:23):
So full of stupid importance, I dare say I was
not very well at that time. I tottered about the streets,
there were various affairs to settle, grinning bitterly at perfectly
respectable persons. I admit my behavior was inexcusable, but then

(17:45):
my temperature was seldom normal in these days. My dear
aunt's endeavors to nurse up my strength seemed altogether beside
the mark. It was not my strength that wanted nursing.
It was my imagination that wanted soothing. I kept the

(18:05):
bundle of papers given me by Kerts, not knowing exactly
what to do with it. His mother had died lately,
watched over as I was told by his intended. 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

(18:30):
pleased to denominate certain documents. I was not surprised, because
I had had two rows with the manager on the
subject out there. I had refused to give up the
smallest scrap out of that package, and I took the
same attitude with the spectacle man. He became darkly menacing

(18:52):
at last, and with much heat, argued that the company
had the right to every bit of information about its terranceies,
and said he mister Kurtz's knowledge of unexplored regions must
have been necessarily extensive and peculiar, owing to his great
abilities and to the deplorable circumstances in which he had

(19:14):
been placed. Therefore, I assured him mister Kurtz's knowledge, however extensive,
did not bear upon the problems of commerce or administration.
He invoked, then the name of science. It would be
an incalculable loss if et cetera, et cetera. I offered

(19:36):
him the Report on the Suppression of Savage Customs, with
the post scriptum torn off. He took it up eagerly,
but ended by sniffing at it with an air of contempt.
This is not what we had a right to expect,
he remarked. Expect nothing else, I said, there are only

(19:56):
private letters. He withdrew upon some threat of legal proceedings,
and I saw him no more. But another fellow calling
himself Kurtz's cousin, appeared two days later and was anxious
to hear all the details about his dear relative's last moments. Incidentally,

(20:16):
he gave me to understand that Kurtz had been essentially
a great musician. There was the making of an immense success,
said the man who was an organist, I believe, with
blank gray hair flowing over a greasy coat collar, I
had no reason to doubt his statements, And to this

(20:37):
day I was unable to say what was Kurtz's profession,
whether he ever had any, which was the greatest of
his talents. I had taken him for a painter who
wrote for the papers, or else for a journalist who
could paint. But even the cousin who took snuff during
the interview could not tell me what he had been exactly.

(21:01):
He was a universal genius on that point. I agreed
with the old chap, who thereupon blew his nose noisily
into a large cotton handkerchief and withdrew in senile agitation,
bearing off some family letters and memoranda without importance. Ultimately,
a journalist, anxious to know something of the fate of

(21:23):
his dear colleague, turned up. This visitor informed me Kurtz's
proper sphere ought to have been in politics on the
popular side. He had very straight eyebrows, bristly hair crop short,
and eyeglass on a broad ribbon, and becoming expansive, confessed
his opinion that Kurtz really couldn't write a bit but

(21:47):
heavens how that man could talk. He electrified large meetings.
He had faith, don't you see? He had the faith
He could get himself to believe any anything. He would
have been a splendid leader of an extreme party. What party,

(22:08):
I asked? Any party, answered the other. He was an
an extremist? Did I not think so? I assented, Did
I know? He asked, with a sudden flash of curiosity,
what it was that had induced him to go out there? Yes,

(22:28):
said I, and forthwith handed him the famous report for
publication if he thought fit. He glanced through it hurriedly,
mumbling all the time, judged it it would do, and
took himself off with his plunder. Thus I was left
at last with a slim packet of letters and the

(22:51):
girl's portrait. She struck me as beautiful. I mean, she
had a beautiful expression. I know that the sunlight can
be made to lie too, Yet one felt that no
manipulation of light and pose could have conveyed the delicate
shade of truthfulness upon these features. She seemed ready to listen,

(23:14):
without mental reservation, without suspicion, without a thought for herself.
I concluded I would go back and give her back
her portrait and those letters myself, curiosity, yes, and some
other feeling. Perhaps all that had been curtseys had passed
out of my hands, his soul, his body, his station,

(23:38):
his plans, his ivory, his career. There remained only his
memory and his intended And I wanted to give that
up too, to the past, in a way, to surrender
personally all that remained of him with me to that oblivion,
which is the last word of our common fate. I

(24:00):
don't defend myself. I had no clear perception of what
it was I really wanted. Perhaps it was an impulse
of unconscious loyalty, or the fulfillment of one of those
ironic necessities that lurk in the facts of human existence.
I don't know. I can't tell, but I went. I

(24:25):
thought his memory was like the other memories of the
dead that accumulated in every man's life, a vague impress
on the brain of shadows that had fallen on it
in their swift and final passage. But before the high
and ponderous door between the tall houses of a street,
as still and decorous as a well kept alley in

(24:46):
a cemetery, I had a vision of him on the stretcher,
opening his mouth voraciously, as if to devour all the
earth with all its mankind. He lived then before for me,
he lived as much as he had ever lived, a shadow,
insatiable of splendid appearances, of frightful realities, a shadow darker

(25:10):
than the shadow of the night, and draped nobly in
the folds of a gorgeous eloquence. The vision seemed to
enter the house with me, the stretcher, the phantom bearers,
the wild crowd of obedient worshippers, the gloom of the forests,
the glitter of the reach between the murky bends, the

(25:30):
beat of the drum, regular and muffled, like the beating
of a heart, the hearts of a conquering darkness. It
was a moment of triumph for the wilderness, an invading
and vengeful rush, which, it seemed to me I would
have to keep back alone for the salvation of another soul,

(25:52):
and the memory of what I had heard him say
afar there, with the horned shapes stirring at my back.
In the glow of fire within the patient woods, those
broken phrases came back to me, were heard again, in
their ominous and terrifying simplicity. I remembered his abject pleading,

(26:13):
his abject threats, the colossal scale of his vile desires,
the meanness, the torment, the tempestuous anguish of his soul.
And later on I seemed to see his collected, languid
manner when he said, one day, this lot of ivory
now is really mine. The company did not pay for it.

(26:38):
I collected it myself at a very great personal risk.
I am afraid they will try to claim it as theirs.
Though it's a difficult case. What do you think I
ought to do? Resist hm, I want no more than justice.
He wanted no more than justice, no more than justice.

(27:05):
I rang the bell before a mahogany door on the
first floor, and while I waited, he seemed to stare
at me out of the glassy panel, stare with that
wide and immense stare, embracing, condemning, loathing all the universe.
I seemed to hear the whispered cry, the horror, the horror.

(27:32):
The dusk was falling. I had to wait in a
lofty drawing room with three long windows from floor to
ceiling that were like three luminous and bedraped columns. The
bent gilt legs and backs of the furniture shone in
indistinct curves. The tall marble fireplace had a cold and

(27:53):
monumental whiteness. A grand piano stood massively in a corner,
with dark gleams on the flat surfaces, like a somber
and polished sarcophagus. A high door opened closed. I rose.
She came forward, all in black, with a pale head

(28:13):
floating towards me in the dusk. She was in mourning.
It was more than a year since his death, more
than a year since the news came. She seemed as
though she would remember and mourn forever. She took both
my hands in hers and murmured, I had heard you

(28:34):
were coming. I noticed she was not very young, I mean,
not girlish. She had a mature capacity for fidelity, for belief,
for suffering. The room seemed to have grown darker, as
if all the sad light of the cloudy evening had
taken refuge on her forehead. This fair hair, this pale visage,

(29:00):
this pure brow, seemed surrounded by an ashy halo from
which the dark eyes looked out at me. Their glance
was guileless, profound, confident, and trustful. She carried her sorrowful
head as though she were proud of that sorrow, as
though she would say, I I alone know how to

(29:23):
mourn for him as he deserves. But while we were
still shaking hands, such a look of awful desolation came
upon her face that I perceived she was one of
those creatures that are not the playthings of time. For her,
he had died only yesterday, And by Jove, the impression

(29:46):
was so powerful that for me too, he seemed to
have died only yesterday. Nay, this very minute, I saw
her and him in the same in distant of time,
his death and her sorrow. I saw her sorrow in
the very moment of his death. Do you understand I

(30:11):
saw them together. I heard them together, she had said,
with a deep catch of the breath, I have survived,
while my strained ears seemed to hear distinctly mingled with
her tone of despairing regret, the summing up whisper of
his eternal condemnation. I asked myself what I was doing there,

(30:37):
with a sensation of panic in my heart, as though
I had blundered into a place of cruel and absurd
mysteries not fit for a human being to behold. She
motioned me to a chair. We sat down. I laid
the packet gently on the little table, and she put
her hand over it. You knew him well, she murmured,

(31:00):
after a moment of mourning silence. Intimacy grows quickly out there.
I said, I knew him as well as it is
possible for one man to know another. And you admired him,
He said, It was impossible to know him and not
admire him. Who was it? He was a remarkable man,

(31:25):
I said, unsteadily. Then, before the appealing fixity of her
gaze that seemed to watch for more words on my lips,
I went on, it was impossible not to love him,
she finished, eagerly, silencing me into an appalled dumbness. How true,

(31:48):
How true? But when you think that no one knew
him so well as I? I had all his noble confidence,
I knew him better. You knew him best, I repeated,
And perhaps she did. But with every word spoken, the

(32:09):
room was growing darker, and only her forehead, smooth and white,
remained illumined by the inextinguishable light of belief and love.
You were his friend, she went on, his friend, she repeated,
a little louder you must have been if he had
given you this and sent you to me. I feel

(32:33):
I can speak to you, and oh I must speak.
I want you you have heard his last words, to
know I have been worthy of him. It is not pride, Yes,
I am proud to know I understood him better than
any one on earth. He told me so himself, and

(32:58):
since his mother died, I have had no one, no
one to to. I listened, the darkness deepened. I was
not even sure whether he had given me the right bundle.
I rather suspect he wanted me to take care of
another batch of his papers, which after his death. I

(33:19):
saw the manager examining under the lamp, and the girl talked,
easing her pain in the certitude of my sympathy. She
talked as thirsty men drink. I had heard that her
engagement with Kurts had been disapproved by her people. He

(33:40):
wasn't rich enough or something. And indeed, I don't know
whether he had not been a pauper all his life.
He had given me some reason to infer that it
was his impatience of comparative poverty that drove him out there.
Who was not his friend, who had heard him speak once.

(34:00):
She was saying, he drew men towards him by what
was best in them. She looked at me with intensity.
It is the gift of the great, she went on,
and the sound of her low voice seemed to have
the accompaniment of all the other sounds, full of mystery, desolation,

(34:21):
and sorrow. I had ever heard, the ripple of the river,
the sowing of the trees swayed by the wind, the
murmurs of the crowds, the faint ring of incomprehensible words
cried from afar, the whisper of a voice speaking from
beyond the threshold of an eternal darkness. But you have

(34:44):
heard him, you know, she cried, Yes, I know, I said,
with something like despair in my heart, but bowing my
head before the faith that was in her, before that
great and saving illusion, that she with an unearthly glow
in the darkness, and the triumphant darkness from which I

(35:05):
could not have defended her, from which I could not
even defend myself. What a lost to me, to us,
she corrected herself with beautiful generosity, then added in a
murmur to the world. By the last gleams of twilight,

(35:26):
I could see the glitter of her eyes, full of tears,
of tears that would not fall. I have been very happy,
very fortunate, very proud. She went on, too fortunate, too
happy for a little while, and now I am unhappy

(35:46):
for for life. She stood up, her fair hair seemed
to catch all the remaining light in a glimmer of gold.
I rose too, And all of this she went on, mournfully,
of all his promise, and of all his greatness, of

(36:07):
his generous mind, of his noble heart. Nothing remains nothing
but a memory. You and I we shall always remember him,
I said, hastily. No, she cried, It is impossible that
all this should be lost, that such a life should

(36:30):
be sacrificed, to leave nothing but sorrow. You know what
vast plans he had. I knew of them too, I
could not perhaps understand, but others knew of them. Something
must remain. His words, at least, have not died. His

(36:52):
words will remain, I said. And his example, she whispered
to herself. Men looked up to him. His goodness shone
in every act, his example, true, I said, his example too, Yes,
his example. I forgot that. But I do not. I cannot,

(37:19):
I cannot believe, not Yet I cannot believe that I
shall never see him again, that nobody will see him again, never, never, never.
She put out her arms as if after a retreating figure,

(37:42):
stretching them back and with clasped pale hands across the
fading and narrow sheen of the window. Never see him.
I saw him clearly enough. Then I shall see this
eloquent phantom as long as I live. And I shall
see her too, a tragic and familiar shade, resembling in

(38:04):
this gesture another one, tragic also, and bedecked with powerless charms,
stretching bare brown arms over the glitter of the infernal stream,
a stream of darkness, she said, suddenly very low. He
died as he lived his end, said I, with dull

(38:28):
anger stirring in me, was in every way worthy of
his life. And I was not with him, She murmured.
My anger subsided before a feeling of infinite pity. Everything
that could be done, I mumbled, Ah, But I believed

(38:50):
in him more than any one on earth, more than
his own mother, more than himself. He needed me me.
I would have treasured every sigh, every word, every sign,
every glance. I felt like a chill grip on my chest,

(39:14):
don't I said, in a muffled voice. Forgive me. I
I have mourned so long in silence, in silence, you
were with him to the last. I think of his loneliness.

(39:36):
Nobody near to understand him as I would have understood, perhaps,
no one to hear to the very end, I said shakily.
I heard his very last words. I stopped in affright.
Repeat them, she murmured in a heart broken tone. I

(40:00):
want I want something, something to to live with. I
was on the point of crying at her. Don't you
hear them? The dusk was repeating them in a persistent
whisper all around us, in a whisper that seemed to

(40:22):
swell menacingly, like the first whisper of a rising wind. Theror,
Theror his last word to live with? She insisted, Don't
you understand I I I loved him. I loved him.

(40:45):
I loved him. I pulled myself together and spoke slowly.
The last word he pronounced was your name. I heard
a lye sigh, and then my heart stood still, stopped
dead short by an exulting and terrible cry, by the

(41:09):
cry of inconceivable triumph and of unspeakable pain. I knew it.
I was sure she knew. She was sure. I heard
her weeping. She had hidden her face in her hands.

(41:29):
It seemed to me that the house would collapse before
I could escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head.
But nothing happened. The heavens do not fall for such
a trifle. Would they have fallen? I wonder if I
had rendered Kurts that justice which was his due? Hadn't

(41:49):
he said he wanted only justice, But I couldn't. I
could not tell her. It would have been too dark,
too dark or together Marlow ceased and sat apart, indistinct
and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha. Nobody

(42:10):
moved for a time. We have lost the first of
the ebb, said the director. Suddenly I raised my head.
The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds,
and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of
the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky. Seemed to

(42:33):
lead into the heart of an immense darkness. And of
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad