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Updated: June 7, 2025
Over the island brooded a spirit sullen, alien, implacable, filled with the threat of latent, malefic forces waiting to be unleashed. It seemed an emanation out of the untamed, sinister heart of Papua herself sinister even when she smiles. And now and then, on the wind, came a breath from virgin jungles, laden with unfamiliar odours, mysterious and menacing.
The rough and varied exercise which they had been compelled to take since starting in the morning climbing trees, and skulking through pathless jungles combined with the varied emotions which their repeated perils had called up all had a tendency to produce thirst; and thirst they now felt in an extreme degree. It was not lessened by the sight of the water shining beneath them.
Toms, and even perhaps of Thurston and Amy Warlock all captives in a strange country, trying to find the escape, each in his or her own fashion, back to the land of their birth. But the land was there. Just as the lion, whose roar very faintly she could hear through the thick walls, remembered in his cage the jungles and mountains of his happiness, so was she aware of hers.
Raucous-voiced birds of brilliant plumage screamed among the branches while innumerable monkeys chattered and scolded above him. The forest teemed with life, and yet there was borne in upon the ape-man a sense of unutterable loneliness, a sensation that he never before had felt in his beloved jungles.
If you have ever heard the night chorus from the jungles on the banks of the rivers you will know how it sounded. The three slaves had never heard sounds like those in all their lives. They were terribly frightened. "Let us drop the bag full of night right here where we are and run away as fast as we can," said the first slave. "We shall perish.
These paths, always of single-file narrowness, tortuously winding to avoid fallen trees and bad ground, never straightened even when obstructions had rotted and gone, branching and crossing in endless network, penetrating jungles and high-grass prairies, passing villages that were and villages that had been, skirting the lairs of savage beasts and the haunts of cannibal men, beset with drought and famine, storm and flood, were threaded only by negroes, bearing arms or bearing burdens.
What but the second sight of genius could have told this inland child that he would one day escape from the torturing round of rebellion in which the soul of his people was imprisoned to the sunless jungles and secret rivers of Africa, where he would find an imperishable booty of wonder and monstrous fear? Many people regard Heart of Darkness as his greatest story.
When an excursion into the woods is proposed, all sorts of exaggerated or imaginary dangers are conjured up, filling the kindly, soothing wilderness with colds, fevers, Indians, bears, snakes, bugs, impassable rivers, and jungles of brush, to which is always added quick and sure starvation.
There are ghosts of little children who have been thrown into wells. These haunt well curbs and the fringes of jungles, and wail under the stars, or catch women by the wrist and beg to be taken up and carried. These and the corpse ghosts, however, are only vernacular articles and do not attack Sahibs.
I made a circuit of about twenty miles down into the low countries, and again ascending through precipitous jungles, I returned home in the evening, having only recovered two dogs, which I found on the other side of the range of mountains, over which the buck had passed.
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