Heart of Darkness

This is an extract from the novel Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, first published in 1899. The narrator is describing the experience of going up the River Congo in Africa, in a steamboat.

Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the water-way ran on, deserted, into the gloom of over-shadowed distances. On silvery sand-banks hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side.

The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands; you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off for ever from everything you had known once -- somewhere -- far away -- in another existence perhaps. There were moments when one's past came back to one, as it will sometimes; but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered with wonder in the midst of this strange world of plants, and water, and silence. And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace.

On we went again into the silence, along empty reaches, round the still bends, between the high walls of our winding way, the heavy beat of the stern-wheel echoing in hollow claps. Trees, trees, millions of trees, massive, immense, running up high; and at their foot, hugging the bank against the stream, crept the little steamboat, like a sluggish beetle crawling on the floor of a lofty building. It made you feel very small, very lost.

We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness. It was very quiet there. At night sometimes the roll of drums behind the curtain of trees would run up the river and remain, as if hovering in the air high over our heads, till the first break of day. Whether it meant war, peace, or prayer we could not tell. The dawns were heralded by the descent of a chill stillness; the wood-cutters slept, their fires burned low; the snapping of a twig would make you start. We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that seemed like an unknown planet.