The Chapman light-house, a three-legged thing erect
on a mud-flat, shone strongly. Lights of ships moved in the fairway--a
great stir of lights going up and going down. And farther west on the
upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously
on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars.
"And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places
of the earth."
He was the only man of us who still "followed the sea." The worst that
could be said of him was that he did not represent his class. He was a
seaman, but he was a wanderer, too, while most seamen lead, if one may
so express it, a sedentary life. Their minds are of the stay-at-home
order, and their home is always with them--the ship; and so is their
country--the sea. One ship is very much like another, and the sea is
always the same. In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign
shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past,
veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance;
for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself,
which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny.
For the rest, after his hours of work, a casual stroll or a casual spree
on shore suffices to unfold for him the secret of a whole continent,
and generally he finds the secret not worth knowing.
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