p.56. Text reads:
"ON THE CONGO.
A WORLD OE SILENCE AND MYSTERY.
'Going up that river was like travelling | back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and ' the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances. On silvery sandbanks hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side. The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands; you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off for ever from everything you had known once--somewhere--far away--in another existence, perhaps. There were moments when one's past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare to yourself; but it came in the shape of an unrestful I and noisy dream, remembered with wonder among the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants, and water, and silence. And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect. I got used to I it afterwards; I did not see it any more; I had no time. I had to keep guessing at the channel I had to discern, mostly by inspiration, the signs of hidden banks; I watched for sunken stones ; I was learning to clap my teeth smartly before my heart flew out, when I shaved by a fluke some infernal sly old snag that would have ripped the life out of the tinpot steamboat and drowned all the pilgrims; I had to keep a look-out for the signs of dead wood we could cut up in the night for next day's gleaming. When you have to attend to things of that sort, to the mere incidents of the surface, the reality, I tell you--fades. The inner truth is hidden--luckily, luckily. But I felt it all the same; I felt ( often its mysterious stillness watching me at my monkey tricks, just as it watches you fellows performing on your respective tight-ropes for--what is it? half a crown a tumble?'
'Try to be civil, Marlow,' growled a voice, and I knew there was at least one listener awake besides myself.
'I beg your pardon. I forgot the heartache which makes up the rest of the price. And, indeed, what does the price matter jf the trick be well done? You do your tricks very well. And I didn't do badly either, since I managed not to sink that steamboat on my first trip. It's a wonder to me yet. Imagine a blindfolded man set to drive a van over a bad road. I sweated and shivered over that business considerably, I can tell you.'"
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