Publisher's Synopsis
Aboard the Nellie, anchored in the River Thames near Gravesend, Charles Marlow tells his fellow sailors how he became captain of a river steamboat for an ivory trading company. As a child, Marlow had been fascinated by "the blank spaces" on maps, particularly by the biggest, which by the time he had grown up was no longer blank but turned into "a place of darkness". Yet there remained a big river, "resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country and its tail lost in the depths of the land". The image of this river on the map fascinated Marlow "as a snake would a bird". Feeling as though "instead of going to the centre of a continent I were about to set off for the centre of the earth", Marlow takes passage on a French steamer bound for the African coast and then into the interior. After more than thirty days the ship anchors off the seat of government near the mouth of the big river. Marlow, with 200 mi (320 km) to go yet, takes passage on a little sea-going steamer captained by a Swede. He departs some 30 mi (48 km) up the river where his company's station is. Work on the railway is going on, involving removal of rocks with explosives. Marlow enters a narrow ravine to stroll in the shade under the trees, and finds himself in "the gloomy circle of some Inferno": the place is full of diseased Africans who worked on the railroad and now lie sick and gaunt, awaiting death. Marlow witnesses the scene "horror-struck."Marlow must wait for ten days in the company's Outer Station. He sleeps in a hut. At this station, which strikes Marlow as a scene of devastation, he meets the company's impeccably dressed chief accountant who tells him of a Mr. Kurtz, who is in charge of a very important trading-post, and a widely respected, first-class agent, a "'very remarkable person'" who "'Sends in as much ivory as all the others put together'". The agent predicts that Kurtz will go very far: "'He will be a somebody in the Administration before long. They, above-the Council in Europe, you know-mean him to be'".Belgian river station on the Congo River, 1889Marlow departs with a caravan of sixty men to travel on foot about 200 miles (320 km) into the wilderness to the Central Station, where the steamboat that he is to captain is based. On the fifteenth day of his march, he arrives at the station, which has some twenty employees and is shocked to learn from a fellow European that his steamboat has been wrecked in an accident two days earlier. He meets the general manager, who informs him that he could wait no longer for Marlow to arrive, because the up-river stations had to be relieved and tells him of a rumour that one important station is in jeopardy because its chief, the exceptional Mr. Kurtz, is ill. "Hang Kurtz", Marlow thinks, irritated. He fishes his boat out of the river and is occupied with its repair for some months, during which a sudden fire destroys a grass shed full of materials used to trade with the natives.