Heart of Darkness: Section II

The manager was switching his leg with a slender twig: his sagacious relative lifted his head.

It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention.

A complaining clamour, modulated in savage discords, filled our ears.

There were either no villages, or the people were hostile, or the director, who like the rest of us fed out of tins, with an occasional old he-goat thrown in, didn't want to stop the steamer for some more or less recondite reason.

Yes; I looked at them as you would on any human being, with a curiosity of their impulses, motives, capacities, weaknesses, when brought to the test of an inexorable physical necessity.

It's really easier to face bereavement, dishonour, and the perdition of one's soul—than this kind of prolonged hunger.

They had no heart to grin, or even to revile me: but I believe they thought me gone mad—with fright, maybe.

We had just floundered and flopped round a bend, when I saw an islet, a mere grassy hummock of bright green, in the middle of the stream.

Over the whole there was a light roof, supported on stanchions.

A fusillade burst out under my feet. The pilgrims had opened with their Winchesters, and were simply squirting lead into that bush.

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.

...with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbours ready to cheer you or to fall on you, stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums—how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man’s untrammelled feet may take him into by the way of solitude—utter solitude without a policeman—by the way of silence—utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbour can be heard...

The peroration was magnificent, though difficult to remember, you know.

And the intimate profundity of that look he gave me when he received his hurt remains to this day in my memory—like a claim of distant kinship affirmed in a supreme moment.

He looked like a harlequin. His clothes had been made of some stuff that was brown holland probably, but it was covered with patches all over, with bright patches, blue, red, and yellow—patches on the back, patches on the front, patches on elbows, on knees; coloured binding around his jacket, scarlet edging at the bottom of his trousers; and the sunshine made him look extremely gay and wonderfully neat withal, because you could see how beautifully all this patching had been done.