These excesses taught him and Marlow what human nature was actually like:The horror!? Kurtz gasped before he died. Marlow's own journey from Belgium to the Congo and thence up the river then took on the aspect of a man's journey into his own inner depths. Marlow was saved from the other man's fate not by higher principles or a better disposition, but merely because he happened to be very busy, and the demands of work were themselves a discipline. The readers perceive, too, that other white men on the Congo refrained from such excesses, if they did so, only because they had lesser, more timorous natures which did not dare to express themselves completely. Marlow felt that he had taken the lid off something horrible in the very depths of man which he could not explain when he returned to the world where basic instincts had been carefully smoothed over. Faced by a crisis, he even denied what he had seen to Kurtz's Intended, though he was appalled by his lie as bringing with it a betrayal of truth which was essentially a kind of death. InHeart of Darkness? the sense of human waste that pervaded the story was best unfolded in the ivory itself. It was an object for the rich - in decorations, for piano keys and billiard balls - hardly a necessary item for survival, or even for comfortable living. In a way, it was evil, a social luxury , an appurtenance to which people had become accustomed; and it was for evil, for appurtenances, that the Congo was plundered and untold numbers of natives were beaten and slaughtered brutally or casually. This view of evil was part of Marlow's conception; a utilitarian object like copper or iron would have had its own reason for being. Kurtz's evil propensities (he collected natives? heads, he sought theevil? ivory) made him so contemptuous of individual lives; for evil and life have traditionally clashed. Beauty for the few was gained with the blood of the many.
