head to the tumult in the station-yard, 'When one has got to make
correct entries, one comes to hate those savages--hate them to the
death.' He remained thoughtful for a moment. 'When you see Mr. Kurtz,'
he went on, 'tell him from me that everything here'--he glanced at the
desk--'is very satisfactory. I don't like to write to him--with those
messengers of ours you never know who may get hold of your letter--at
that Central Station.' He stared at me for a moment with his mild,
bulging eyes. 'Oh, he will go far, very far,' he began again. 'He
will be a somebody in the Administration before long. They, above--the
Council in Europe, you know--mean him to be.'

"He turned to his work. The noise outside had ceased, and presently
in going out I stopped at the door. In the steady buzz of flies the
homeward-bound agent was lying flushed and insensible; the other,
bent over his books, was making correct entries of perfectly correct
transactions; and fifty feet below the doorstep I could see the still
tree-tops of the grove of death.

"Next day I left that station at last, with a caravan of sixty men, for
a two-hundred-mile tramp.

"No use telling you much about that. Paths, paths, everywhere; a
stamped-in network of paths spreading over the empty land, through
long grass, through burnt grass, through thickets, down and up chilly
ravines, up and down stony hills ablaze with heat; and a solitude, a
solitude, nobody, not a hut. The population had cleared out a long
time ago. Well, if a lot of mysterious niggers armed with all kinds of
fearful weapons suddenly took to traveling on the road between Deal and
Gravesend, catching the yokels right and left to carry heavy loads for
them, I fancy every farm and cottage thereabouts would get empty very