"You get the deep green of the heart of the continent, the mournful brooding leafiness--the natives herded and distracted, more afraid of the blast of a river-steamer's whistle than of any kind of violent death. Death was familiar to them. They were chained to labour, cast loose to die. Vultures swept the sky waiting for their limbs to fall still. There was the salty pester of fever in the air--men foolish with fever and heat--a haze of flies--white men burning out inside--oxidisation of human souls--a steady and hideous beat of death--devils of hate and violence and acquisitiveness--clerks making entries of Ivory--a nation's young men running through the jungles for Ivory--carloads of bright glass beads and painted calico for Ivory--all standards of life and career-building set upon Ivory--murder for that--lives lost, tribes shattered--the leafy heart of a fresh continent seared with the civil flame of greed--commodities dumped in river beds--mails that men would die for torn open by vandal hands--waste, perversity, nothing clean-cut even of crime, the horrible non-initiative of the middlemen.... All this told with patient exactitude, but with indescribable intensity; told by a master-hand that trembles; with the control that one can only know who is sensitive enough to tremble. You feel a big man bending forward to make you see something that all but killed him to find out. You feel him scarred and sick, his heart leaking, because he found it all so hideously and stupidly rotten. It's a little picture of a trade war--that's the point--the war of middlemen--middlemen turning to rend each other.... Heart of darkness--after that the light comes." Steve opened and shut his fingers in the sunlight. The warmth was sweeter every minute. "This fellow sees it all," he went on. "He's done a big job for me--for anybody who gives himself to the book. There's something immortal about being a workman like that--about any workman. That's why one wants to cast a weep after the passing hordes of middlemen. They can't do work. They don't even see the fog of human agony they've painted the world with. They are _it_. It is the old against the old. It's all about Ivory. They crucify for fossil." Steve was lighting up.