Kitabı oku: «Сердце тьмы. Уровень 2 / Heart of Darkness», sayfa 2

The sun set. The dusk fell on the stream. Lights began to appear along the shore. The Chapman light-house⁷ shone strongly. Lights of ships moved in the fairway. And farther west on the upper the place of the monstrous town was marked ominously on the sky. It was a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars.

“And this is also,” said Marlow suddenly, “one of the dark places of the earth.”

He was the only man of us who still “followed the sea.” The worst thing was that he did not represent his class. He was a seaman, but he was a wanderer, too, while most seamen lead a sedentary life. Their home is always with them – the ship. So is their country – the sea. One ship is very much like another. The sea is always the same. In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the immensity of life, glide past. There is nothing mysterious to a seaman but the sea itself. The sea is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny.

2

After his hours of work, a casual stroll or a casual spree on shore unfolds for him the secret of a whole continent. Generally he finds no secrets there. The stories of seamen have a direct simplicity. The whole meaning of it lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical. To him the meaning of an episode was not inside like but outside.

His remark did not seem surprising. It was just like Marlow. It was accepted in silence. No one grunted. Presently he said, very slow,

“I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago – the other day… Light came out of this river since – you say Knights? Yes; but it is like a blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker. And the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday. Imagine the feelings of a commander of a fine trireme in the Mediterranean. He received the order to go north. To run overland across the Gauls in a hurry. They were wonderful men, indeed! If we may believe what we read, of course. Imagine him here – the very end of the world. Sand-banks, marshes, forests, savages, nothing to eat, nothing but Thames water to drink. No wine here. Only a military camp in a wilderness, like a needle in a bundle of hay – cold, fog, tempests, disease, exile, and death. Death in the air, in the water, in the bush. The people were dying like flies here. Oh, yes, they were brave men. Brave enough to face the darkness. Think of a young citizen in a toga. He is a tax-gatherer, or a trader. There’s no initiation into such mysteries. He lived in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too. The fascination of the abomination – you know, imagine the regrets, the wish to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.”

He paused.

“Listen,” he began again.

He lifted one arm from the elbow, the palm of the hand outwards. So had the pose of a Buddha in European clothes and without a lotus-flower.

“Listen, none of us can feel exactly like this. What saves us is efficiency – the devotion to efficiency. But these chaps were no colonists. Their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were conquerors. For that you want only brute force. You can’t boast of it, when you have it. Your strength is just an accident, it arises from the weakness of others. They grab what they can get. It was just robbery with violence, just murder. The conquest of the earth… They just take it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea. An unselfish belief in the idea is something you can bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to… ”