Читать книгу Сердце тьмы. Уровень 2 / Heart of Darkness - Джозеф Конрад, Ford Madox Hueffer - Страница 8

I left in a French steamer. That steamer called in every blamed port – to land soldiers and custom-house officers. I watched the coast. To watch a coast is to think about an enigma. There it is before you – smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, ‘Come and find out.’

This one was almost featureless. The edge of a colossal jungle, so dark-green, almost black, fringed with white surf, ran straight, like a ruled line, far, far away along a blue sea whose glitter was blurred by a mist. The sun was fierce. The land glistened and dripped with steam. Here and there greyish-whitish specks showed up clustered inside the white surf, with a flag above them perhaps. Settlements some centuries old, and still no bigger than pinheads.

We pounded along, stopped, landed soldiers; went on, landed custom-house clerks. Some people got drowned in the surf. But nobody particularly cared. On we went.

Every day the coast looked the same. We passed various places – trading places – with names like Gran’ Bassam, Little Popo. These names seemed to belong to some sordid farce.

The idleness of a passenger, my isolation amongst all these men with whom I had no contact, the oily and languid sea, the uniform sombreness of the coast, kept me away from the truth of things. I was within the toil of a mournful and senseless delusion. The voice of the surf now – and then was a positive pleasure, like the speech of a brother. It was something natural, that had its reason, that had a meaning.

Now and then[18] a boat from the shore gave one a momentary contact with reality. It was paddled by black fellows. I saw from afar the white of their eyeballs. They shouted, sang. Their bodies streamed with perspiration. They had faces like grotesque masks – these chaps. But they had bone, muscle, a wild vitality, an intense energy of movement. It was as natural and true as the surf along their coast. They wanted no excuse.