The natural landscape

Quote

Character

Chapter

“Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma... always mute with an air of whispering. Come and find out.”

Marlow

1

“The edge of a colossal jungle, so dark-green as to be almost black... ran straight, like a ruled line.”

Marlow

1

“A blue sea whose glitter was blurred by a creeping mist.”

Marlow

1

“As if Nature herself had tried to ward of intruders... streams of death in life, whose banks were rotting into mud, whose waters thinking to slime, invaded the contorted mangroves, that seemed to write at us in the extremity of an impotent despair.”

Marlow

1

“The silent wilderness surrounding this cleared speck on the earth struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing of this fantastic invasion.”

Marlow

1

“The smell of mud, of primeval mud... was in my nostrils, the high stillness of primeval forests was before my eyes. . . “

Marlow

1

“Vegetation standing higher than the wall of a temple”

Marlow

1

“I wondered whether the stillness of the face of the immensity looking at us two were meant as an appeal or as a menace.”

Marlow

1

“I felt how big, how confoundedly big, was that thing that couldn’t talk, and perhaps was deaf as well.”

Marlow

1

“The great wall of vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass... motionless in the moonlight, was like a rioting invasion of soundless life, a rolling wave of plants, piled up, crested, reading to topple over...to sweep every little man of us out of his little existence.”

Marlow

2

“Going up that river was like travelling to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings.”

Marlow

2

“An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest.”

Marlow

2

“The reaches opened before us and closed behind us, as if... to bar the way for our return.”

Marlow

2

“We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil.”

Marlow

2

“We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled... We could not understand, because we were too far and could not remember“