out there, for, as far as I could see, the sole purpose of landing soldiers and custom-house officers...

Odnośniki

Smutek to uczucie, jak gdyby się tonęło, jak gdyby grzebano cię w ziemi.

I watched the
coast. Watching a coast as it slips by the
ship is like thinking about an enigma.
There it is before you—smiling,
frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid,
or savage, and always mute with an air
of whispering, 'Come and find out.' This
one was almost featureless, as if still in
the making, with an aspect of
monotonous grimness. The edge of a
colossal jungle, so dark-green as to be
almost black, fringed with white surf,
ran straight, like a ruled line, far, far
away along a blue sea whose glitter was
blurred by a creeping mist. The sun was
fierce, the land seemed to glisten and
drip with steam. Here and there grayish-
whitish specks showed up, clustered
inside the white surf, with a flag flying
above them perhaps. Settlements some
centuries old, and still no bigger than
pin-heads on the untouched expanse of their background. We pounded along,
stopped, landed soldiers; went on,
landed custom-house clerks to levy toll
in what looked like a God-forsaken
wilderness, with a tin shed and a flag-
pole lost in it; landed more soldiers—to
take care of the custom-house clerks,
presumably. Some, I heard, got drowned
in the surf; but whether they did or not,
nobody seemed particularly to care.
They were just flung out there, and on
we went. Every day the coast looked the
same, as though we had not moved; but
we passed various places—trading
places—with names like Gran' Bassam
Little Popo, names that seemed to belong
to some sordid farce acted in front of a
sinister backcloth. The idleness of a passenger, my isolation amongst all
these men with whom I had no point of
contact, the oily and languid sea, the
uniform somberness of the coast, seemed
to keep me away from the truth of things,
within the toil of a mournful and
senseless delusion. The voice of the surf
heard now and then was a positive
pleasure, like the speech of a brother. It
was something natural, that had its
reason, that had a meaning. Now and
then a boat from the shore gave one a
momentary contact with reality. It was
paddled by black fellows. You could
see from afar the white of their eyeballs
glistening. They shouted, sang; their
bodies streamed with perspiration; they
had faces like grotesque masks—these chaps; but they had bone, muscle, a wild
vitality, an intense energy of movement,
that was as natural and true as the surf
along their coast. They wanted no excuse
for being there. They were a great
comfort to look at. For a time I would
feel I belonged still to a world of
straightforward facts; but the feeling
would not last long. Something would
turn up to scare it away. Once, I
remember, we came upon a man-of-war
anchored off the coast. There wasn't
even a shed there, and she was shelling
the bush. It appears the French had one
of their wars going on thereabouts. Her
ensign dropped limp like a rag; the
muzzles of the long eight-inch guns stuck
out all over the low hull; the greasy, slimy swell swung her up lazily and let
her down, swaying her thin masts. In the
empty immensity of earth, sky, and
water, there she was, incomprehensible,
firing into a continent. Pop, would go
one of the eight-inch guns; a small flame
would dart and vanish, a little white
smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile
would give a feeble screech—and
nothing happened. Nothing could
happen. There was a touch of insanity in
the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious
drollery in the sight; and it was not
dissipated by somebody on board
assuring me earnestly there was a camp
of natives—he called them enemies!—
hidden out of sight somewhere.
"We gave her her letters (I heard the men in that lonely ship were dying of fever at
the rate of three a day) and went on. We
called at some more places with farcical
names, where the merry dance of death
and trade goes on in a still and earthy
atmosphere as of an overheated
catacomb; all along the formless coast
bordered by dangerous surf, as if Nature
herself had tried to ward off intruders; in
and out of rivers, streams of death in
life, whose banks were rotting into mud,
whose waters, thickened into slime,
invaded the contorted mangroves, that
seemed to writhe at us in the extremity of
an impotent despair. Nowhere did we
stop long enough to get a particularized
impression, but the general sense of
vague and oppressive wonder grew
upon me. It was like a weary pilgrimage
amongst hints for nightmares.
"It was upward of thirty days before I
saw the mouth of the big river. We
anchored off the seat of the government.
But my work would not begin till some
two hundred miles farther on. So as soon