Читать книгу Сердце тьмы. Уровень 2 / Heart of Darkness - Джозеф Конрад, Ford Madox Hueffer - Страница 9

Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war[19]. There wasn’t even a shed there. That man-of-war was shelling the bush. It appears the French had one of their wars thereabouts. The ensign dropped limp like a rag. The muzzles of the long six-inch guns stuck out all over the low hull. The greasy, slimy swell swung it up lazily and let it down. In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there it was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent.

Pop – went one of the six-inch guns. A small flame darted and vanished. A little white smoke disappeared. A tiny projectile gave a feeble screech – and nothing happened. Nothing happened. There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight. Somebody on board assured me earnestly there was a camp of natives – he called them enemies!.

We gave them letters (I heard the men in that lonely ship were dying of fever: three men a day) and went on. We visited some more places with farcical names, where the merry dance of death and trade goes on in a still and earthy atmosphere. I saw the formless coast bordered by dangerous surf. Nature herself tried to ward off intruders; in and out of rivers, streams of death in life, whose banks were rotting into mud, whose waters invaded the contorted mangroves.

We stopped nowhere long enough to get a particularized impression. The general sense of vague and oppressive wonder grew upon me. It was like a weary pilgrimage amongst hints for nightmares.