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“It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—the suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you—you so remote from the night of first ages—could comprehend. And why not?”
As Marlow journeys up the
river toward the Inner Station in the first section of Part 2,
he catches occasional glimpses of native villages along the riverbanks.
More often, though, he simply hears things: drums, chants, howls.
These engage his imagination, and the fact that they do so troubles
him, because it suggests, as he says, a “kinship” with these men,
whom he has so far been able to classify as “inhuman.” This moment
is one of several in the text in which Marlow seems to admit the
limits of his own perception. These moments allow for a reading
of
