mongst the devils of the land--I mean literally. You can't understand.
How could you?--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 whispering of public opinion? These little things make all the
great difference. When they are gone you must fall back upon your own
innate strength, upon your own capacity for faithfulness. Of course you
may be too much of a fool to go wrong--too dull even to know you are
being assaulted by the powers of darkness. I take it, no fool ever made
a bargain for his soul with the devil; the fool is too much of a fool,
or the devil too much of a devil--I don't know which. Or you may be such
a thunderingly exalted creature as to be altogether deaf and blind to
anything but heavenly sights and sounds. Then the earth for you is only
a standing place--and whether to be like this is your loss or your gain
I won't pretend to say. But most of us are neither one nor the other.
The earth for us is a place to live in, where we must put up with
sights, with sounds, with smells, too, by Jove!--breathe dead hippo,
so to speak, and not be contaminated. And there, don't you see?
Your strength comes in, the faith in your ability for the digging of
unostentatious holes to bury the stuff in--your power of devotion,
not to yourself, but to an obscure, back-breaking business. And that's
difficult enough. Mind, I am not trying to excuse or even explain--I am
trying to account to myself for--for--Mr. Kurtz--for the shade of Mr.
Kurtz. This initiated wraith from the back of Nowhere honoured me with
its amazing confidence before it vanished altogether. This was because
it could speak English to me. The original Kurtz had been educated
partly in England, and--as he was good enough to say himself--his
sympathies were in the right place. His mother was half-English, his
father was half-French. All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz;
and by and by I learned that, most appropriately, the International
Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs had intrusted him with the
making of a re