Disturbed Marlow leaves the grove to soothe his shaken mind. Rather than confront the horror head-on, he retreats; later he will not have this luxury. Marlow moves from the natives to a European: the Company's chief accountant, who suggests the immense amount of money that the Company is making from its campaign of terror and whose dress is impeccable.
Marlow calls the Accountant a "miracle" because of his ability to keep up a dignified European appearance amidst the sweltering and muddy jungle. He even has a penholder behind his ear. Completely and willingly oblivious to the horrors around him, the Accountant cares only for figures and his own importance: When a sick agent is temporarily placed in his hut, the Accountant complains.
He also tells Marlow, "When one has got to make correct entries, one comes to hate those savages — hate them to the death. Previous Part 1. Next Part 1. Removing book from your Reading List will also remove any bookmarked pages associated with this title. Are you sure you want to remove bookConfirmation and any corresponding bookmarks?
My Preferences My Reading List. Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad. Summary and Analysis Part 1. Adam Bede has been added to your Reading List! They finally arrive at the mouth of the Congo River, where Marlow boards another steamship bound for a point thirty miles upriver.
The captain of the ship, a young Swede, recognizes Marlow as a seaman and invites him on the bridge. The Swede criticizes the colonial officials and tells Marlow about another Swede who recently hanged himself on his way into the interior. He sees piles of decaying machinery and a cliff being blasted for no apparent purpose. He also sees a group of black prisoners walking along in chains under the guard of another black man, who wears a shoddy uniform and carries a rifle.
He offers a biscuit to one of them; seeing a bit of white European yarn tied around his neck, he wonders at its meaning. Marlow spends ten days here waiting for a caravan to the next station.
One day, the chief accountant tells him that in the interior he will undoubtedly meet Mr. Kurtz , a first-class agent who sends in as much ivory as all the others put together and is destined for advancement. He tells Marlow to let Kurtz know that everything is satisfactory at the Outer Station when he meets him.
The chief accountant is afraid to send a written message for fear it will be intercepted by undesirable elements at the Central Station. Marlow frequently encounters inscrutable surfaces that tempt him to try to penetrate into the interior of situations and places.
The most prominent example of this is the French man-of-war, which shells a forested wall of coastline. He refers back to this image at a number of key points later in the story. Marlow distinguishes this devil from violence, greed, and desire, suggesting that the fundamental evil of imperialism is not that it perpetrates violence against native peoples, nor that it is motivated by greed.
The flabby, weak-eyed devil seems to be distinguished above all by being shortsighted and foolish, unaware of what it is doing and ineffective. The colonials in the coastal station spend all their time blasting a cliff for no apparent reason, machinery lies broken all around, and supplies are poorly apportioned, resting in abundance where they are not needed and never sent to where they are needed.
Given the level of waste and inefficiency, this kind of colonial activity clearly has something other than economic activity at stake, but just what that something might be is not apparent. Would Marlow approve of the violent exploitation and extortion of the Africans if it was done in a more clear-sighted and effective manner? This question is difficult to answer definitively.
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