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668.I ordered the chain, which we had begun to heave in, to be paid out again. Before it stopped running with a muffled rattle, a cry, a very loud cry as of infinite desolation, soared slowly in the opaque air. It ceased. A complaining clamour, modulated in savage discords, filled our ears. The sheer unexpectedness of it made my hair stir under my cap. I don't know how it struck the others: to me it seemed as though the mist itself had screamed, so suddenly, and apparently from all sides at once, did this tumultuous and mournful uproar arise. It culminated in a hurried outbreak of almost intolerably excessive shrieking, which stopped short, leaving us stiffened in a variety of silly attitudes, and obstinately listening to the nearly as appalling and excessive silence ..... What we could see was just the steamer we were on, her outline blurred as though she had been on the point of dissolving, and a misty strip of water, perhaps two feet broad, around her - and that was all. The rest of the world was nowhere, as far as our eyes and ears were concerned. Just nowhere. Gone, disappeared; swept off without leaving a whisper or a shadow behind.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, from Tales of Land and Sea, Hanover House, Garden City, N.Y., 1953, p. 68.
PLACE: a French colony in Africa
TIME: 18th or 19th century
CIRCUMSTANCE: An attack by a black tribe on a boat of white travellers, in extremely foggy weather.
There was a great commotion in the bush; the shower of arrows stopped, a few dropping shots rang out sharply - then silence, in which the languid beat of the sternwheel came plainly to my ears.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, New York, Dell Publishing Co., 1960, p. 84.
PLACE: Congo
TIME: 18th or 19th century
CIRCUMSTANCE: First ivory-hunters
The monotonous beating of a big drum filled the air with muffled shocks and a lingering vibration. A steady droning sound of many men chanting each to himself some weird cantation came out from the black, flat wall of the woods as the humming of bees comes out of a hive, and had a strange narcotic effect upon my half-awake senses. I believe I dozed off leaning over the rail, till an abrupt burst of yells, an overwhelming out-break of pent-up and mysterious frenzy, woke me up in a bewildered wonder. It was cut short all at once and the low droning went on with an effect of audible and soothing silence.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, New York, Dell Publishing Co., 1960, p. 107.
PLACE: Congo
TIME: 18th or 19th century
CIRCUMSTANCE: First ivory-hunters
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