บทที่ บทที่ 4 · 第2章（1）

"One evening as I was lying flat on the deck of my steamboat, I heard

voices approaching--and there were the nephew and the uncle strolling

along the bank. I laid my head on my arm again, and had nearly lost

myself in a doze, when somebody said in my ear, as it were: 'I am as

harmless as a little child, but I don't like to be dictated to. Am I the

manager--or am I not? I was ordered to send him there. It's incredible.'

. . . I became aware that the two were standing on the shore alongside

the forepart of the steamboat, just below my head. I did not move; it

did not occur to me to move: I was sleepy. 'It _is_ unpleasant,' grunted

the uncle. 'He has asked the Administration to be sent there,' said the

other, 'with the idea of showing what he could do; and I was instructed

accordingly. Look at the influence that man must have. Is it not

frightful?' They both agreed it was frightful, then made several bizarre

remarks: 'Make rain and fine weather--one man--the Council--by the

nose'--bits of absurd sentences that got the better of my drowsiness,

so that I had pretty near the whole of my wits about me when the uncle

said, 'The climate may do away with this difficulty for you. Is he alone

there?' 'Yes,' answered the manager; 'he sent his assistant down the

river with a note to me in these terms: "Clear this poor devil out of

the country, and don't bother sending more of that sort. I had rather be

alone than have the kind of men you can dispose of with me." It was more

than a year ago. Can you imagine such impudence!' 'Anything since

then?' asked the other, hoarsely. 'Ivory,' jerked the nephew; 'lots

of it--prime sort--lots--most annoying, from him.' 'And with that?'

questioned the heavy rumble. 'Invoice,' was the reply fired out, so to

speak. Then silence. They had been talking about Kurtz.

"I was broad awake by this time, but, lying perfectly at ease, remained

still, having no inducement to change my position. 'How did that ivory

come all this way?' growled the elder man, who seemed very vexed. The

other explained that it had come with a fleet of canoes in charge of an

English half-caste clerk Kurtz had with him; that Kurtz had apparently

intended to return himself, the station being by that time bare of goods

and stores, but after coming three hundred miles, had suddenly decided

to go back, which he started to do alone in a small dug-out with four

paddlers, leaving the half-caste to continue down the river with the

ivory. The two fellows there seemed astounded at anybody attempting such

a thing. They were at a loss for an adequate motive. As to me, I seemed

to see Kurtz for the first time. It was a distinct glimpse: the dug-out,

four paddling savages, and the lone white man turning his back suddenly

on the headquarters, on relief, on thoughts of home--perhaps; setting

his face towards the depths of the wilderness, towards his empty and

desolate station. I did not know the motive. Perhaps he was just simply

a fine fellow who stuck to his work for its own sake. His name, you

understand, had not been pronounced once. He was 'that man.' The

half-caste, who, as far as I could see, had conducted a difficult

trip with great prudence and pluck, was invariably alluded to as 'that

scoundrel.' The 'scoundrel' had reported that the 'man' had been very

ill--had recovered imperfectly. . . . The two below me moved away then a

few paces, and strolled back and forth at some little distance. I heard:

'Military post--doctor--two hundred miles--quite alone now--unavoidable

delays--nine months--no news--strange rumors.' They approached again,

just as the manager was saying, 'No one, as far as I know, unless a

species of wandering trader--a pestilential fellow, snapping ivory from

the natives.' Who was it they were talking about now? I gathered in

snatches that this was some man supposed to be in Kurtz's district, and

of whom the manager did not approve. 'We will not be free from unfair

competition till one of these fellows is hanged for an example,'

he said. 'Certainly,' grunted the other; 'get him hanged! Why not?

Anything--anything can be done in this country. That's what I say;

nobody here, you understand, _here_, can endanger your position. And

why? You stand the climate--you outlast them all. The danger is in

Europe; but there before I left I took care to--' They moved off and

whispered, then their voices rose again. 'The extraordinary series of

delays is not my fault. I did my possible.' The fat man sighed, 'Very

sad.' 'And the pestiferous absurdity of his talk,' continued the other;

'he bothered me enough when he was here. "Each station should be like a

beacon on the road towards better things, a center for trade of course,

but also for humanizing, improving, instructing." Conceive you--that

ass! And he wants to be manager! No, it's--' Here he got choked by

excessive indignation, and I lifted my head the least bit. I was

surprised to see how near they were--right under me. I could have spat

upon their hats. They were looking on the ground, absorbed in thought.

The manager was switching his leg with a slender twig: his sagacious

relative lifted his head. 'You have been well since you came out this

time?' he asked. The other gave a start. 'Who? I? Oh! Like a charm--like

a charm. But the rest--oh, my goodness! All sick. They die so quick,

too, that I haven't the time to send them out of the country--it's

incredible!' 'H'm. Just so,' grunted the uncle. 'Ah! my boy, trust to

this--I say, trust to this.' I saw him extend his short flipper of

an arm for a gesture that took in the forest, the creek, the mud, the

river,--seemed to beckon with a dishonoring flourish before the sunlit

face of the land a treacherous appeal to the lurking death, to the

hidden evil, to the profound darkness of its heart. It was so startling

that I leaped to my feet and looked back at the edge of the forest, as

though I had expected an answer of some sort to that black display of

confidence. You know the foolish notions that come to one sometimes. The

high stillness confronted these two figures with its ominous patience,

waiting for the passing away of a fantastic invasion.

"They swore aloud together--out of sheer fright, I believe--then

pretending not to know anything of my existence, turned back to the

station. The sun was low; and leaning forward side by side, they seemed

to be tugging painfully uphill their two ridiculous shadows of unequal

length, that trailed behind them slowly over the tall grass without

bending a single blade.

"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 sandbanks 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 away--in another

existence perhaps. There were moments when one's past came back to one,

as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare to yourself;

but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered

with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of

plants, and water, and silence. And this stillness of life did not in

the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force

brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful

aspect. I got used to it afterwards; I did not see it any more; I had no

time. I had to keep guessing at the channel; I had to discern, mostly by

inspiration, the signs of hidden banks; I watched for sunken stones; I

was learning to clap my teeth smartly before my heart flew out, when I

shaved by a fluke some infernal sly old snag that would have ripped the

life out of the tin-pot steamboat and drowned all the pilgrims; I had to

keep a look-out for the signs of dead wood we could cut up in the night

for next day's steaming. When you have to attend to things of that sort,

to the mere incidents of the surface, the reality--the reality, I tell

you--fades. The inner truth is hidden--luckily, luckily. But I felt it

all the same; I felt often its mysterious stillness watching me at

my monkey tricks, just as it watches you fellows performing on your

respective tight-ropes for--what is it? half-a-crown a tumble--"

"Try to be civil, Marlow," growled a voice, and I knew there was at

least one listener awake besides myself.

"I beg your pardon. I forgot the heartache which makes up the rest of

the price. And indeed what does the price matter, if the trick be well

done? You do your tricks very well. And I didn't do badly either, since

I managed not to sink that steamboat on my first trip. It's a wonder to

me yet. Imagine a blindfolded man set to drive a van over a bad road.

I sweated and shivered over that business considerably, I can tell

you. After all, for a seaman, to scrape the bottom of the thing that's

supposed to float all the time under his care is the unpardonable sin.

No one may know of it, but you never forget the thump--eh? A blow on the

very heart. You remember it, you dream of it, you wake up at night and

think of it--years after--and go hot and cold all over. I don't pretend

to say that steamboat floated all the time. More than once she had to

wade for a bit, with twenty cannibals splashing around and pushing.

We had enlisted some of these chaps on the way for a crew. Fine

fellows--cannibals--in their place. They were men one could work with,

and I am grateful to them. And, after all, they did not eat each other

before my face: they had brought along a provision of hippo-meat

which went rotten, and made the mystery of the wilderness stink in my

nostrils. Phoo! I can sniff it now. I had the manager on board and three

or four pilgrims with their staves--all complete. Sometimes we came upon

a station close by the bank, clinging to the skirts of the unknown, and

the white men rushing out of a tumble-down hovel, with great gestures of

joy and surprise and welcome, seemed very strange,--had the appearance

of being held there captive by a spell. The word ivory would ring in

the air for a while--and on we went again into the silence, along empty

reaches, round the still bends, between the high walls of our

winding way, reverberating in hollow claps the ponderous beat of the

stern-wheel. Trees, trees, millions of trees, massive, immense, running

up high; and at their foot, hugging the bank against the stream, crept

the little begrimed steamboat, like a sluggish beetle crawling on the

floor of a lofty portico. It made you feel very small, very lost, and

yet it was not altogether depressing, that feeling. After all, if you

were small, the grimy beetle crawled on--which was just what you wanted

it to do. Where the pilgrims imagined it crawled to I don't know.

To some place where they expected to get something, I bet! For me it

crawled toward Kurtz--exclusively; but when the steam-pipes started

leaking we crawled very slow. The reaches opened before us and closed

behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar

the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart

of darkness. It was very quiet there. At night sometimes the roll of

drums behind the curtain of trees would run up the river and remain

sustained faintly, as if hovering in the air high over our heads, till

the first break of day. Whether it meant war, peace, or prayer we could

not tell. The dawns were heralded by the descent of a chill stillness;

the woodcutters slept, their fires burned low; the snapping of a twig

would make you start. We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an

earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied

ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance,

to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil. But

suddenly, as we struggled round a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush

walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs,

a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes

rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage. The steamer

toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy.

The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us--who

could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings;

we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane

men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not

understand, because we were too far and could not remember, because we

were traveling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone,

leaving hardly a sign--and no memories.

"The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled

form of a conquered monster, but there--there you could look at a thing

monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were--No, they were

not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it--this suspicion of

their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled, and

leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just

the thought of their humanity--like yours--the thought of your remote

kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly

enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that

there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible

frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it

which you--you so remote from the night of first ages--could comprehend.

And why not? The mind of man is capable of anything--because everything

is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after

all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valor, rage--who can tell?--but

truth--truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and

shudder--the man knows, and can look on without a wink. But he must at

least be as much of a man as these on the shore. He must meet that

truth with his own true stuff--with his own inborn strength. Principles?

Principles won't do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags--rags that would

fly off at the first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief. An

appeal to me in this fiendish row--is there? Very well; I hear; I admit,

but I have a voice too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that

cannot be silenced. Of course, a fool, what with sheer fright and fine

sentiments, is always safe. Who's that grunting? You wonder I didn't go

ashore for a howl and a dance? Well, no--I didn't. Fine sentiments, you

say? Fine sentiments, be hanged! I had no time. I had to mess about with

white-lead and strips of woolen blanket helping to put bandages on

those leaky steam-pipes--I tell you. I had to watch the steering, and

circumvent those snags, and get the tin-pot along by hook or by crook.

There was surface-truth enough in these things to save a wiser man. And

between whiles I had to look after the savage who was fireman. He was

an improved specimen; he could fire up a vertical boiler. He was there

below me, and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a

dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat, walking on his hind-legs.

A few months of training had done for that really fine chap. He squinted

at the steam-gauge and at the water-gauge with an evident effort of

intrepidity--and he had filed teeth too, the poor devil, and the wool of

his pate shaved into queer patterns, and three ornamental scars on each

of his cheeks. He ought to have been clapping his hands and stamping

his feet on the bank, instead of which he was hard at work, a thrall to

strange witchcraft, full of improving knowledge. He was useful because

he had been instructed; and what he knew was this--that should the water

in that transparent thing disappear, the evil spirit inside the boiler

would get angry through the greatness of his thirst, and take a terrible

vengeance. So he sweated and fired up and watched the glass fearfully

(with an impromptu charm, made of rags, tied to his arm, and a piece of

polished bone, as big as a watch, stuck flatways through his lower lip),

while the wooded banks slipped past us slowly, the short noise was left

behind, the interminable miles of silence--and we crept on, towards

Kurtz. But the snags were thick, the water was treacherous and shallow,

the boiler seemed indeed to have a sulky devil in it, and thus neither

that fireman nor I had any time to peer into our creepy thoughts.

"Some fifty miles below the Inner Station we came upon a hut of reeds,

an inclined and melancholy pole, with the unrecognizable tatters of

what had been a flag of some sort flying from it, and a neatly stacked

woodpile. This was unexpected. We came to the bank, and on the stack of

firewood found a flat piece of board with some faded pencil-writing

on it. When deciphered it said: 'Wood for you. Hurry up. Approach

cautiously.' There was a signature, but it was illegible--not

Kurtz--a much longer word. 'Hurry up.' Where? Up the river? 'Approach

cautiously.' We had not done so. But the warning could not have been

meant for the place where it could be only found after approach.

Something was wrong above. But what--and how much? That was the

question. We commented adversely upon the imbecility of that telegraphic

style. The bush around said nothing, and would not let us look very far,

either. A torn curtain of red twill hung in the doorway of the hut, and

flapped sadly in our faces. The dwelling was dismantled; but we could

see a white man had lived there not very long ago. There remained a rude

table--a plank on two posts; a heap of rubbish reposed in a dark corner,

and by the door I picked up a book. It had lost its covers, and the

pages had been thumbed into a state of extremely dirty softness; but the

back had been lovingly stitched afresh with white cotton thread, which

looked clean yet. It was an extraordinary find. Its title was, 'An

Inquiry into some Points of Seamanship,' by a man Tower, Towson--some

such name--Master in his Majesty's Navy. The matter looked dreary

reading enough, with illustrative diagrams and repulsive tables of

figures, and the copy was sixty years old. I handled this amazing

antiquity with the greatest possible tenderness, lest it should dissolve

in my hands. Within, Towson or Towser was inquiring earnestly into the

breaking strain of ships' chains and tackle, and other such matters. Not

a very enthralling book; but at the first glance you could see there a

singleness of intention, an honest concern for the right way of going

to work, which made these humble pages, thought out so many years ago,

luminous with another than a professional light. The simple old sailor,

with his talk of chains and purchases, made me forget the jungle and

the pilgrims in a delicious sensation of having come upon something

unmistakably real. Such a book being there was wonderful enough; but

still more astounding were the notes penciled in the margin, and plainly

referring to the text. I couldn't believe my eyes! They were in cipher!

Yes, it looked like cipher. Fancy a man lugging with him a book of that

description into this nowhere and studying it--and making notes--in

cipher at that! It was an extravagant mystery.

"I had been dimly aware for some time of a worrying noise, and when I

lifted my eyes I saw the wood-pile was gone, and the manager, aided by

all the pilgrims, was shouting at me from the river-side. I slipped the

book into my pocket. I assure you to leave off reading was like tearing

myself away from the shelter of an old and solid friendship.

"I started the lame engine ahead. 'It must be this miserable

trader--this intruder,' exclaimed the manager, looking back malevolently

at the place we had left. 'He must be English,' I said. 'It will not

save him from getting into trouble if he is not careful,' muttered the

manager darkly. I observed with assumed innocence that no man was safe

from trouble in this world.

"The current was more rapid now, the steamer seemed at her last gasp,

the stern-wheel flopped languidly, and I caught myself listening on

tiptoe for the next beat of the boat, for in sober truth I expected the

wretched thing to give up every moment. It was like watching the last

flickers of a life. But still we crawled. Sometimes I would pick out a

tree a little way ahead to measure our progress towards Kurtz by, but

I lost it invariably before we got abreast. To keep the eyes so long

on one thing was too much for human patience. The manager displayed

a beautiful resignation. I fretted and fumed and took to arguing with

myself whether or no I would talk openly with Kurtz; but before I could

come to any conclusion it occurred to me that my speech or my silence,

indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility. What did it matter

what anyone knew or ignored? What did it matter who was manager? One

gets sometimes such a flash of insight. The essentials of this affair

lay deep under the surface, beyond my reach, and beyond my power of

meddling.

"Towards the evening of the second day we judged ourselves about eight

miles from Kurtz's station. I wanted to push on; but the manager looked

grave, and told me the navigation up there was so dangerous that it

would be advisable, the sun being very low already, to wait where we

were till next morning. Moreover, he pointed out that if the warning

to approach cautiously were to be followed, we must approach in

daylight--not at dusk, or in the dark. This was sensible enough. Eight

miles meant nearly three hours' steaming for us, and I could also see

suspicious ripples at the upper end of the reach. Nevertheless, I was

annoyed beyond expression at the delay, and most unreasonably too, since

one night more could not matter much after so many months. As we had

plenty of wood, and caution was the word, I brought up in the middle

of the stream. The reach was narrow, straight, with high sides like a

railway cutting. The dusk came gliding into it long before the sun had

set. The current ran smooth and swift, but a dumb immobility sat on

the banks. The living trees, lashed together by the creepers and every

living bush of the undergrowth, might have been changed into stone,

even to the slenderest twig, to the lightest leaf. It was not sleep--it

seemed unnatural, like a state of trance. Not the faintest sound of any

kind could be heard. You looked on amazed, and began to suspect yourself

of being deaf--then the night came suddenly, and struck you blind as

well. About three in the morning some large fish leaped, and the loud

splash made me jump as though a gun had been fired. When the sun rose

there was a white fog, very warm and clammy, and more blinding than the

night. It did not shift or drive; it was just there, standing all round

you like something solid. At eight or nine, perhaps, it lifted as a

shutter lifts. We had a glimpse of the towering multitude of trees,

of the immense matted jungle, with the blazing little ball of the sun

hanging over it--all perfectly still--and then the white shutter came

down again, smoothly, as if sliding in greased grooves. I ordered the

chain, which we had begun to heave in, to be paid out again. Before it

stopped running with a muffled rattle, a cry, a very loud cry, as of

infinite desolation, soared slowly in the opaque air. It ceased. A

complaining clamor, modulated in savage discords, filled our ears. The

sheer unexpectedness of it made my hair stir under my cap. I don't know

how it struck the others: to me it seemed as though the mist itself had

screamed, so suddenly, and apparently from all sides at once, did

this tumultuous and mournful uproar arise. It culminated in a hurried

outbreak of almost intolerably excessive shrieking, which stopped short,

leaving us stiffened in a variety of silly attitudes, and obstinately

listening to the nearly as appalling and excessive silence. 'Good God!

What is the meaning--?' stammered at my elbow one of the pilgrims,--a

little fat man, with sandy hair and red whiskers, who wore side-spring

boots, and pink pyjamas tucked into his socks. Two others remained

open-mouthed a whole minute, then dashed into the little cabin, to rush

out incontinently and stand darting scared glances, with Winchesters at

'ready' in their hands. What we could see was just the steamer we

were on, her outlines blurred as though she had been on the point of

dissolving, and a misty strip of water, perhaps two feet broad, around

her--and that was all. The rest of the world was nowhere, as far as our

eyes and ears were concerned. Just nowhere. Gone, disappeared; swept off

without leaving a whisper or a shadow behind.

"I went forward, and ordered the chain to be hauled in short, so as to

be ready to trip the anchor and move the steamboat at once if necessary.

'Will they attack?' whispered an awed voice. 'We will all be butchered

in this fog,' murmured another. The faces twitched with the strain, the

hands trembled slightly, the eyes forgot to wink. It was very curious

to see the contrast of expressions of the white men and of the black

fellows of our crew, who were as much strangers to that part of the

river as we, though their homes were only eight hundred miles away. The

whites, of course greatly discomposed, had besides a curious look of

being painfully shocked by such an outrageous row. The others had an

alert, naturally interested expression; but their faces were essentially

quiet, even those of the one or two who grinned as they hauled at the

chain. Several exchanged short, grunting phrases, which seemed to settle

the matter to their satisfaction. Their headman, a young, broad-chested

black, severely draped in dark-blue fringed cloths, with fierce nostrils

and his hair all done up artfully in oily ringlets, stood near me.

'Aha!' I said, just for good fellowship's sake. 'Catch 'im,' he snapped,

with a bloodshot widening of his eyes and a flash of sharp teeth--'catch

'im. Give 'im to us.' 'To you, eh?' I asked; 'what would you do with

them?' 'Eat 'im!' he said curtly, and, leaning his elbow on the rail,

looked out into the fog in a dignified and profoundly pensive attitude.

I would no doubt have been properly horrified, had it not occurred to

me that he and his chaps must be very hungry: that they must have been

growing increasingly hungry for at least this month past. They had been

engaged for six months (I don't think a single one of them had any

clear idea of time, as we at the end of countless ages have. They still

belonged to the beginnings of time--had no inherited experience to teach

them as it were), and of course, as long as there was a piece of paper

written over in accordance with some farcical law or other made down the

river, it didn't enter anybody's head to trouble how they would live.

Certainly they had brought with them some rotten hippo-meat, which

couldn't have lasted very long, anyway, even if the pilgrims hadn't, in

the midst of a shocking hullabaloo, thrown a considerable quantity of it

overboard. It looked like a high-handed proceeding; but it was really

a case of legitimate self-defense. You can't breathe dead hippo waking,

sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on

existence. Besides that, they had given them every week three pieces of

brass wire, each about nine inches long; and the theory was they were to

buy their provisions with that currency in river-side villages. You can

see how _that_ worked. 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. So, unless they swallowed the wire

itself, or made loops of it to snare the fishes with, I don't see what

good their extravagant salary could be to them. I must say it was paid

with a regularity worthy of a large and honorable trading company. For

the rest, the only thing to eat--though it didn't look eatable in the

least--I saw in their possession was a few lumps of some stuff like

half-cooked dough, of a dirty lavender color, they kept wrapped in

leaves, and now and then swallowed a piece of, but so small that it

seemed done more for the looks of the thing than for any serious purpose

of sustenance. Why in the name of all the gnawing devils of hunger they

didn't go for us--they were thirty to five--and have a good tuck in for

once, amazes me now when I think of it. They were big powerful men,

with not much capacity to weigh the consequences, with courage, with

strength, even yet, though their skins were no longer glossy and their

muscles no longer hard. And I saw that something restraining, one of

those human secrets that baffle probability, had come into play there.

I looked at them with a swift quickening of interest--not because it

occurred to me I might be eaten by them before very long, though I

own to you that just then I perceived--in a new light, as it were--how

unwholesome the pilgrims looked, and I hoped, yes, I positively hoped,

that my aspect was not so--what shall I say?--so--unappetizing: a touch

of fantastic vanity which fitted well with the dream-sensation that

pervaded all my days at that time. Perhaps I had a little fever too. One

can't live with one's finger everlastingly on one's pulse. I had

often 'a little fever,' or a little touch of other things--the playful

paw-strokes of the wilderness, the preliminary trifling before the more

serious onslaught which came in due course. 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. Restraint! What possible restraint? Was it

superstition, disgust, patience, fear--or some kind of primitive honor?

No fear can stand up to hunger, no patience can wear it out, disgust

simply does not exist where hunger is; and as to superstition, beliefs,

and what you may call principles, they are less than chaff in a breeze.

Don't you know the devilry of lingering starvation, its exasperating

torment, its black thoughts, its somber and brooding ferocity? Well,

I do. It takes a man all his inborn strength to fight hunger properly.

It's really easier to face bereavement, dishonor, and the perdition of

one's soul--than this kind of prolonged hunger. Sad, but true. And these

chaps too had no earthly reason for any kind of scruple. Restraint! I

would just as soon have expected restraint from a hyena prowling amongst

the corpses of a battlefield. But there was the fact facing me--the fact

dazzling, to be seen, like the foam on the depths of the sea, like a

ripple on an unfathomable enigma, a mystery greater--when I thought

of it--than the curious, inexplicable note of desperate grief in this

savage clamor that had swept by us on the river-bank, behind the blind

whiteness of the fog.