Chapter 2

He was the only man of us who still “followed the sea.” The worst that
could be said of him was that he did not represent his class. He was a
seaman, but he was a wanderer, too, while most seamen lead, if one may
so express it, a sedentary life. Their minds are of the stay-at-home
order, and their home is always with them—the ship; and so is their
country—the sea. One ship is very much like another, and the sea is
always the same. In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign
shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past,
veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful
ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the
sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable
as Destiny. For the rest, after his hours of work, a casual stroll or a
casual spree on shore suffices to unfold for him the secret of a whole
continent, and generally he finds the secret not worth knowing. The
yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which
lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if
his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an
episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale
which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness
of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the
spectral illumination of moonshine.

His remark did not seem at all surprising. It was just like Marlow. It
was accepted in silence. No one took the trouble to grunt even; and
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 running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the
clouds. We live in the flicker—may it last as long as the old earth
keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday. Imagine the feelings of
a commander of a fine—what d’ye call ’em?—trireme in the Mediterranean,
ordered suddenly to the north; run overland across the Gauls in a
hurry; put in charge of one of these craft the legionaries—a wonderful
lot of handy men they must have been, too—used to build, apparently by
the hundred, in a month or two, if we may believe what we read. Imagine
him here—the very end of the world, a sea the colour of lead, a sky the
colour of smoke, a kind of ship about as rigid as a concertina—and
going up this river with stores, or orders, or what you like.
Sand-banks, marshes, forests, savages,—precious little to eat fit for a
civilized man, nothing but Thames water to drink. No Falernian wine
here, no going ashore. Here and there a military camp lost in a
wilderness, like a needle in a bundle of hay—cold, fog, tempests,
disease, exile, and death—death skulking in the air, in the water, in
the bush. They must have been dying like flies here. Oh, yes—he did it.
Did it very well, too, no doubt, and without thinking much about it
either, except afterwards to brag of what he had gone through in his
time, perhaps. They were men enough to face the darkness. And perhaps
he was cheered by keeping his eye on a chance of promotion to the fleet
at Ravenna by and by, if he had good friends in Rome and survived the
awful climate. Or think of a decent young citizen in a toga—perhaps too
much dice, you know—coming out here in the train of some prefect, or
tax-gatherer, or trader even, to mend his fortunes. Land in a swamp,
march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the
utter savagery, had closed round him—all that mysterious life of the
wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of
wild men. There’s no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to
live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable.
And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The
fascination of the abomination—you know, imagine the growing regrets,
the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.”

He paused.

“Mind,” he began again, lifting one arm from the elbow, the palm of the
hand outwards, so that, with his legs folded before him, he had the
pose of a Buddha preaching in European clothes and without a
lotus-flower—“Mind, none of us would feel exactly like this. What saves
us is efficiency—the devotion to efficiency. But these chaps were not
much account, really. They were no colonists; their administration was
merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were conquerors,
and for that you want only brute force—nothing to boast of, when you
have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the
weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of
what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated
murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind—as is very proper
for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth, which
mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different
complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty
thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only.
An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and
an unselfish belief in the idea—something you can set up, and bow down
before, and offer a sacrifice to….”