a nearer view, and its first result was to make me throw my head back as if before a blow. Then I went carefully from post to post with my glass, and I saw my mistake. These round knobs were not ornamental but symbolic; they were symbolic of some cruel and forbidden knowledge. They were expressive and puzzling, striking and disturbing, food for thought and also for the vultures if there had been any looking down from the sky; but at all events for such ants as were industrious enough to ascend the pole. They would have been even more impressive, those heads on the stakes, if their faces had not been turned to the house. Only one, the first I had made out, was facing my way. I was not so shocked as you may think. The start back I had given was really nothing but a movement of surprise. I had expected to see a knob of wood there, you know. I returned deliberately to the first I had seen—and there it was, black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids,— a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and, with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth, was smiling too, smiling continuously at some endless and jocose dream of that eternal slumber.
“I am not disclosing any trade secrets. In fact the manager said afterwards that Mr Kurtz had ruined that district. I have no opinion as to that, but I want you clearly to understand that there was nothing profitable in these heads being there. They only showed that Mr Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts, that there was something wanting in him—some small matter which, when the pressing need arose, could not be found under his magnificent eloquence. Whether he knew of this deficiency himself I can’t say. I think the knowledge came to him at last—only at the very last. But the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. It had tempted him with all the sinister suggestions of its loneliness. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude—and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core. I put down the glass, and the head that had appeared near enough to be spoken to seemed at once to have leaped away from me into the illusion of an inaccessible distance.
“The admirer of Mr Kurtz hung his head. With a hurried, indistinct voice he began to tell me he had not dared to take these—say, symbols—down. He was not afraid of the natives; they would not move till Mr Kurtz gave the word. His ascendancy was extraordinary, The camps of these people surrounded the place, and the chiefs came every day to see him. They crawled. ‘I don’t want to know of the
