# “The horror! The horror!” by Joseph Conrad

- Link: https://tollelege.net/2008/09/22/the-horror-the-horror-by-joseph-conrad/
- Published: 2008-09-22T01:42:11-05:00
- Author: tollelege

“I had a vision of him on the stretcher, opening his mouth voraciously, as if to
devour all the earth with all its mankind. He lived then before me; he lived as 
much as he had ever lived—a shadow insatiable of splendid appearances, of frightful
realities; a shadow darker than the shadow of the night, and draped nobly in the
folds of a gorgeous eloquence.

The vision seemed to enter the house with me—the stretcher, the phantom-bearers,
the wild crowd of obedient worshippers, the gloom of the forests, the glitter of
the reach between the murky bends, the beat of the drum, regular and muffled like
the beating of a heart—the heart of a conquering darkness.

It was a moment of triumph for the wilderness, an invading and vengeful rush which,
it seemed to me, I would have to keep back alone for the salvation of another soul.
And the memory of what I had heard him say afar there, with the horned shapes stirring
at my back, in the glow of fires, within the patient woods, those broken phrases
came back to me, were heard again in their ominous and terrifying simplicity.

I remembered his abject pleading, his abject threats, the colossal scale of his 
vile desires, the meanness, the torment, the tempestuous anguish of his soul. And
later on I seemed to see his collected languid manner, when he said one day, ‘This
lot of ivory now is really mine. The Company did not pay for it. I collected it 
myself at a very great personal risk. I am afraid they will try to claim it as theirs
though. H’m. It is a difficult case. What do you think I ought to do—resist? Eh?
I want no more than justice.’…

He wanted no more than justice—no more than justice. I rang the bell before a mahogany
door on the first floor, and while I waited he seemed to stare at me out of the 
glassy panel— stare with that wide and immense stare embracing, condemning, loathing
all the universe. I seemed to hear the whispered cry, ‘The horror! The horror!’”

–Joseph Conrad, _Heart of Darkness_ (New York: Penguin Books, 1899/2007), 91-2.

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