One day he said, without looking up, "You'll probably meet Mr. Kurtz in the interior." When I asked who Mr. Kurtz was, he said he was a top employee; seeing my frustration, he added slowly, putting down his pen, "He's a very remarkable person." I asked more questions, and learned that Mr. Kurtz was in charge of a very important trading post in the main ivory area, "deep in the interior." He sends back more ivory than everyone else combined… He started writing again. The sick man was too weak to make sounds.
Suddenly, there was a growing noise of voices and many feet. A group of travelers had arrived. A loud, confused shouting was heard on the other side of the boards. All the workers were talking at once, and in the middle of the confusion, the chief agent's sad voice was heard giving up, for the twentieth time that day. He stood up slowly. "What a terrible noise," he said. He quietly walked across the room to check on the sick man, and coming back, said to me, "He can't hear." "What! Is he dead?" I asked, surprised. "No, not yet," he answered calmly. Then, gesturing towards the confusion in the yard, "When you have to make accurate records, you come to hate these people – hate them very much." He thought for a moment. "When you see Mr. Kurtz," he continued, "tell him from me that everything here" – he looked at the deck – "is fine. I don't like to write to him – with our messengers, you never know who might read your letter – at that main office." He looked at me for a moment with his gentle, wide eyes. "Oh, he will go far, very far," he started again. "He will be an important person in the government soon. The people in charge – the Council in Europe – want him to succeed."
He returned to his work. The noise outside had stopped, and as I left, I paused at the door. In the constant noise of flies, the sick agent lay still and unconscious; the other, bent over his books, was carefully recording perfectly normal business; and fifty feet below, I could see the still tops of the trees in the deadly forest.
The next day, I finally left the station with a group of sixty men. We were going on a long, 200-mile walk.
There's not much to tell you about that. Paths, paths everywhere – a network of paths across the empty land. They went through tall grass, burnt grass, bushes, up and down cool valleys, and over hot hills. It was very lonely; no one, not a single house. The people had left a long time ago. If a group of armed people suddenly started traveling between Deal and Gravesend, making local people carry heavy things for them, I imagine everyone would leave quickly. Here, though, the houses were gone too. I passed several abandoned villages. The ruined grass walls looked sadly. Day after day, I walked with sixty people behind me, each carrying a heavy load. We camped, cooked, slept, packed up, and marched. Sometimes, someone died, lying in the grass by the path, with their empty water bottle and walking stick. It was very quiet. Sometimes at night, you could hear distant drums, a faint, strange sound – maybe as meaningful as church bells. Once, I met a white man in a partly-buttoned uniform, camping with armed guards. He said he was looking after the road, but I didn’t see any road or any work being done, except maybe the body of a dead man I found a few miles later.