"We had carried Kurtz into the pilot-house: there was more air there.
Lying on the couch, he stared through the open shutter. There was an
eddy in the mass of human bodies, and the woman with helmeted head and
tawny cheeks rushed out to the very brink of the stream. She put out her
hands, shouted something, and all that wild mob took up the shout in a
roaring chorus of articulated, rapid, breathless utterance.
"'Do you understand this?' I asked.
"He kept on looking out past me with fiery, longing eyes, with a mingled
expression of wistfulness and hate. He made no answer, but I saw a
smile, a smile of indefinable meaning, appear on his colourless lips
that a moment after twitched convulsively. 'Do I not?' he said slowly,
gasping, as if the words had been torn out of him by a supernatural
power.
"I pulled the string of the whistle, and I did this because I saw the
pilgrims on deck getting out their rifles with an air of anticipating a
jolly lark. At the sudden screech there was a movement of abject terror
through that wedged mass of bodies. 'Don't! don't you frighten them
away,' cried some one on deck disconsolately. I pulled the string
time after time. They broke and ran, they leaped, they crouched, they
swerved, they dodged the flying terror of the sound.
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