3, pp. 93-94].) Significantly, however, whereas Marlow freely discloses to his male listeners his disgust for “the philanthropic pretence of the whole concern” (p. 61 ), to his aunt the most he has done is “ventured to hint that the Company was run for profit” (p.48). His recollection of this exchange leads him to reflect on the differences between men and women in a passage whose condescension is ringingly primitive:

It’s queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there had never been anything like it, and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset. Some confounded fact we men have been living contentedly with ever since the day of creation would start up and knock the whole thing over (p. 48).

Precisely the sorts of ugly truths that women are allegedly incapable of stomaching are what Marlow will be subjected to in the Congo. Upon his arrival he is struck by the perfidiousness of the white company agents, whom he terms “pilgrims” in order to underscore the hypocrisy of the quasi-religious rhetoric that masks their criminal conduct. They are ruthless schemers who view Marlow (as they do Kurtz) with mistrust, as he has been represented to them by his aunt’s friends as one of “the new gang—the gang of virtue” (p. 62); that is, they believe him to take seriously the civilizing propaganda associated with the company’s endeavors and thus worry that he may impede their ability to generate profits. Marlow is also appalled by the condition of the indigenous workers. In one episode a chain gang of Congolese laborers overseen by an African collaborator with a rifle passes by:

Six black men advanced in a file, toiling up the path. They walked erect and slow, balancing small baskets full of earth on their heads, and the clink kept time with their footsteps. Black rags were wound round their loins, and the short ends behind waggled to and fro like tails. I could see every rib, the joints of their limbs were like knots in a rope; each had an iron collar on his neck, and all were connected together with a chain... (p. 51 ).

In a spectacle that he likens to something out of Dante’s depiction of Hell in the Inferno, he subsequently sees what the fate of such men is when they become too exhausted and sick to work:

Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair.... [T]his was the place where some of the helpers had withdrawn to die.

They were dying slowly—it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now,—nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom (pp. 52-53).

During the several months that Marlow spends in the Central Station (modern Kinshasa, then named Leopoldville), he becomes intrigued by the reputation of the one company agent who appears to be a genuine humanitarian. The chief of the Inner Station (modern Kisangani, then Stanley Falls), Kurtz is, moreover, an accomplished painter, poet, musician, and essayist; in short, he is a consummate example of the best that European civilization has to offer. As Marlow sets out on his thousand-mile, two-month-long steamship journey upriver to retrieve Kurtz, the spectacle of rampant hypocrisy among his colleagues has led him to be curious to see how someone fortified with what appear to be genuine “moral ideas” (p. 69) has fared under these circumstances. Toward the end of the journey, when the ship comes under native attack, Marlow assumes the violent episode to indicate that Kurtz must be dead, but he subsequently finds that this is not the case. (Later, Kurtz’s young Russian worshiper will confide in him that it was actually the great man himself who ordered the attack on the ship.) By the time Marlow reaches the compound and sees human heads displayed on stakes, he realizes that Kurtz is not at all the enlightened altruist he had been hoping to meet. These impressions are confirmed later when Marlow learns of the appalling circumstances of Kurtz’s rule, which have included “midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites” (p. 92) over which he has presided.

Marlow becomes acquainted with Kurtz in person during the brief remainder of the emaciated ivory trader’s life (he presumably has dysentery, an illness that Conrad himself contracted while in Africa) and concludes that he has undergone a reversal of the instinctual renunciations upon which civilization is based: “the wilderness,” Marlow observes, “seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts” (p. 111). What Marlow finds particularly illuminating in documenting this reversal is the manuscript of an essay that Kurtz has entrusted to him.