e poured into
the clearing by the dark-faced and pensive forest. The bushes shook, the
grass swayed for a time, and then everything stood still in attentive
immobility.

"'Now, if he does not say the right thing to them we are all done for,'
said the Russian at my elbow. The knot of men with the stretcher had
stopped too, half-way to the steamer, as if petrified. I saw the man on
the stretcher sit up, lank and with an uplifted arm, above the shoulders
of the bearers. 'Let us hope that the man who can talk so well of love
in general will find some particular reason to spare us this time,' I
said. I resented bitterly the absurd danger of our situation, as if
to be at the mercy of that atrocious phantom had been a dishonoring
necessity. I could not hear a sound, but through my glasses I saw the
thin arm extended commandingly, the lower jaw moving, the eyes of
that apparition shining darkly far in its bony head that nodded with
grotesque jerks. Kurtz--Kurtz--that means short in German--don't it?
Well, the name was as true as everything else in his life--and death.
He looked at least seven feet long. His covering had fallen off, and his
body emerged from it pitiful and appalling as from a winding-sheet. I
could see the cage of his ribs all astir, the bones of his arm waving.
It was as though an animated image of death carved out of old ivory had
been shaking its hand with menaces at a motionless crowd of men made of
dark and glittering bronze. I saw him open his mouth wide--it gave him
a weirdly voracious aspect, as though he had wanted to swallow all the
air, all the earth, all the men before him. A deep voice reached
me faintly. He must have been shouting. He fell back suddenly. The
stretcher shook as the bearers staggered forward again, and almost at
the same time I noticed that the crowd of savages was vanishing without
any perceptible movement of retreat, as if the forest that had ejected
these beings so suddenly had drawn them in again as the breath is drawn
in a long aspiration.

"Some of the pilgrims behind the stretcher carried his arms--two
shot-guns, a heavy rifle, and a light revolver-carbine--the thunderbolts
of that pitiful Jupiter. The manager bent over him murmuring as
he walked beside his head. They laid him down in one of the little
cabins--just a room for a bed-place and a camp-stool or two, you know.
We had brought his belated correspondence, and a lot of torn envelopes
and open letters littered his bed