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before he sets out for Africa. Complaining to his listeners that she viewed him as an “emissary of light, something like a lower sort of apostle,” he points out that “[t]here had been a lot of such rot let loose in print and talk just about that time” (p. 48). Conrad had given a taste of what Marlow means by “such rot” in his ironically titled short story “An Outpost of Progress” (1897), which, like Heart of Darkness, depicts the moral degradation of ivory traders in the Congo. In this story a Belgian newspaper “discussed what it was pleased to call ‘Our Colonial Expansion’ in high-flown language. It spoke much of the rights and duties of civilization, of the sacredness of the civilizing work, and extolled the merits of those who went about bringing light, and faith and commerce to the dark places of the earth” (Tales of Unrest, p. 94). (It bears pointing out that some of the most egregiously insincere instances of such Belgian propaganda came from the pen of King Leopold himself. It should also be noted that Conrad signaled the importance of the nationality of the story’s Belgian pro tagonists when he emphatically corrected a reader who mistook them for Frenchmen [Collected Letters, vol. 3, pp. 93-94].) Significantly, however, whereas Marlow freely discloses to his male listeners his disgust for “the philanthropic pretence of the whole concern” (p. 61 ), to his aunt the most he has done is “ventured to hint that the Company was run for profit” (p.48). His recollection of this exchange leads him to reflect on the differences between men and women in a passage whose condescension is ringingly primitive:

It’s queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there had never been anything like it, and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset. Some confounded fact we men have been living contentedly with ever since the day of creation would start up and knock the whole thing over (p. 48).

Precisely the sorts of ugly truths that women are allegedly incapable of stomaching are what Marlow will be subjected to in the Congo. Upon his arrival he is struck by the perfidiousness of the white company agents, whom he terms “pilgrims” in order to underscore the hypocrisy of the quasi-religious rhetoric that masks their criminal conduct. They are ruthless schemers who view Marlow (as they do Kurtz) with mistrust, as he has been represented to them by his aunt’s friends as one of “the new gang—the gang of virtue” (p. 62); that is, they believe him to take seriously the civilizing propaganda associated with the company’s endeavors and thus worry that he may impede their ability to generate profits. Marlow is also appalled by the condition of the indigenous workers. In one episode a chain gang of Congolese laborers overseen by an African collaborator with a rifle passes by:

Six black men advanced in a file, toiling up the path. They walked erect and slow, balancing small baskets full of earth on their heads, and the clink kept time with their footsteps. Black rags were wound round their loins, and the short ends behind waggled to and fro like tails. I could see every rib, the joints of their limbs were like knots in a rope; each had an iron collar on his neck, and all were connected together with a chain... (p. 51 ).

In a spectacle that he likens to something out of Dante’s depiction of Hell in the Inferno, he subsequently sees what the fate of such men is when they become too exhausted and sick to work:

Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair.... [T]his was the place where some of the helpers had withdrawn to die.

They were dying slowly—it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now,—nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom (pp. 52-53).

During