# An Introduction
Conrad’s dense prose in Heart of Darkness, mixed with his thoroughly disorienting narrative structure, recreates the shifting uncertainty of the times in which he wrote, a pre-modern society that had begun to examine the reality behind a glorified rhetoric of its own advancement. Such idealism for the reader belies the barbarity of “aggravated murder” perpetrated in the name of empire, a notion that in many ways was used to justify the apparent immorality of the enterprise that was beginning to surface in Europe. The text, therefore, comes to embrace a deep exploration of man’s innate capability for primitive atrocities, a tribal quality formerly associated to the “savages” being colonized. However, in order to articulate for his conservative readership what this darkness constitutes, Conrad’s own enduring vision of Africa as a setting for this self-inspection is clouded by regressive biases itself, oftentimes propagating the racially-fuelled ideas of his era that sought to deny this alien culture a voice amidst the colonisation of its own people.  

# Onwards and Upwards
In the opening sentences of the text characterising the Nellie as “being bound down the river”, Conrad immediately undermines a Western sense of immutable societal progression, thereby challenging liberal humanist assumptions of man’s inexorable ascension. The “cruising yawl” becomes an image for a pre-modern reader of a stagnant, if not at times cyclical, reality of European empire, only able to idly “wait for the turn of the tide” and thus constrained by the shifting views of its time. The ship, including the “Director of Companies” and the other crewmen on board, as a piece of the capitalistic machine of empire, is therefore representative of an unsettling inefficacy of late-Victorian colonialism, an entity unable to deliver on its presumptions of spiritual and cultural development. Indeed, despite the openly reverent tone of the primary narrator here, his panegyric is subtly eroded by a setting that resonates from sinister unease, the “mournful gloom” that blankets itself across the “haze” of dusk. Contrasted against a romantic-era views of Europe possessing a universal truth and clarity in its endeavours, Conrad’s purposefully dark and ambiguous landscape gives way to a linguistic tension between more traditional notions of Western certainty in their civilising mission and a moral uneasiness that lurks beneath. This discord is similarly evoked in Conrad’s layered narrative structure itself, a complex rhetorical device which, in one way, opens the possibility for presenting the reader with a multiplicity of contradicting viewpoints, but also – perhaps because of this – a novella that at times is rendered inconclusive and almost indecipherable, a direct upending of more reassuring forms of classical European literature that promised a sense of closure for its readership. Conrad’s text, therefore, in all its equivocal ruminations, stands as a challenge towards comforting perceptions of the endeavour of empire and the West’s ontological insistence of an intrinsic moral validity to this enterprise. To a contemporary reader, Conrad, the self-professed modern author, and his text dispute the rhetoric of a clear social advancement and enlightenment, thus broaching the elusive concept of an objective truth common to a pre-modern world. Unlike the tenet of liberal humanism foregrounded in Peter Barry’s Beginning Theory, that a “literary text contains its own meaning within itself”, even when detached from socio-political considerations, reality for both Marlow – and by extension, Conrad – is a murky and uncertain “glow” that comes to us in the fading light of “moonshine”. Through such an upending, Conrad rises to the avant-garde of late 19th century literature and its destabilisation of former perceptions of Europe and its empire.

# A Civilising Mission?
Writing in a society still marred by a Eurocentric ambivalence towards the destructiveness of colonial hegemony, Conrad’s disruptive novella thus compels the reader to comprehend the “robbery with violence” enacted under the pretence of the mission civilisatrice. Marlow’s use of blunt consonants throughout his contemplations on empire – “brute force”, “aggravated”, “robbery” – lend a far more bitter tone to the proceedings, one at odds with the “sacred fire” which one can “bow down before” in veneration. Though Marlow here is admittedly trying to capture the rapacious brutality of Roman empire “nineteen hundred years ago”, the qualifier of “the other day” captures for Conrad the ultimately cyclical nature of imperialist history. This wilfulness to distance oneself from this depravity is thus representative of a dishonest attempt to initially ignore Marlow’s own culpability in the colonial machine, akin to the “men going at it blind”. Given the pecuniary wealth thought at the time to be lying untapped in the continent of Africa, such myopia to the avarice proceedings around them becomes all the more problematic, as empire seemingly becomes morally justified by the gluttonous “squeeze” of capitalistic gain. It is this reductive lens of sweeping hegemonic expansion that Conrad therefore attempts to dismantle in Marlow’s journey, fittingly encapsulated in Kurtz’s “small sketch in oils” that Marlow sees at the station. Being in the process of travelling up river and thus exploring Europe’s and his own collective darkness, he is at least cognisant, if not condemning of, the regressive lie of a civilised West and a barbarous Congolese. Largely dismantled in the reader’s eyes by the ominous quality of Marlow’s experience, the redeeming light spread forth by the “torch” of empire is a motif throughout the text for the ironic veneration to a cultural ideology that celebrated white superiority and thus reduced Africa as a whole to a dark continent of barbarity. Here, however, the Roman goddess of justice, Astraea, though still carrying the “lighted torch”, is blindfolded, rendered unaware and ultimately confined by the “sombre” backcloth of the painting itself. Conrad’s evocation of this Roman deity – in all its connotations of classical epistemological belief systems - thus becomes a critique of conventional visions of a spiritually cultivated Europe, which brings only a prejudiced ethnocentric form of justice and civility to the colonized. 

# Circularity
Yet in order to expose these intrinsic contradictions, Conrad at times depicts many of the odious tropes of empire, thus perpetuating the relegation of the African and his culture to a state of ‘otherness’ and inferiority. In Marlow labelling the “savage who was fireman” as an “improved specimen”, his almost scientific handling of this “fine chap” rings from the heart of the industrial colonising machine, a system which sought to relate the progression of the colonized to their perceived benefits as links in the chain of imperialism. Undoubtedly, Conrad intended to synthesize the distancing of the Indigenous man under colonialism through such apathetic, dehumanising language. Nonetheless, in simultaneously hinting at an ability for the Congolese to ascend towards European ideals of betterment, he plays into the notions of hybridity, a state of the West upholding its conceived racial hierarchy, yet still electing to view the supposed ‘inferiors’ through their own lens. Writing at a time when such a degrading plight was a normalcy under imperialist racism, Conrad’s portrayal of this “savage” therefore draws from the late-Victorian reserve of prejudiced cultural blindness. Even the setting of Africa as a backdrop for the novella’s journey into man’s heart of darkness is problematic for a 21st century readership, since it too becomes subsumed and consequently deprioritised by an ethnocentric interest in Western society and its morality. To travel up the Congo River is like “travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world”, a troubling return to a primordial self. The implication for Conrad, here, is likely that the waterway, in its confounding sombreness, forces a European coloniser to recognise his own untapped potential for primal savagery, yet his conscious decision for the African landscape to be the vessel of this dark uncovering, evokes the retrograde notion of the ‘dark continent’ being merely the stage for the central act of Western progression. Indeed, this “empty stream” contrasted against the opening panegyric to the Thames, “the beginning of an interminable waterway”, further embellishes the lack of authorial interest in the Indigenous culture, leaving it blank to be filled by the central narrative line of the colonisers. It must be said, that for Conrad, as a European himself, to attempt to capture the subtleties of this foreign culture would mean risking becoming even more insular, as his subsequent depiction would become defined through his own experiences and perceptions of the world he aims to capture. Ultimately, whilst he does indeed destabilise the conventional interpretations of both Africa and empire in his text, as author Caryl Phillips posits, “in order to expose European fragility, Conrad pandered to a certain stereotype of Africa that, at the time, was accepted as norm”. Despite offering a largely progressive summation of the horrors of colonialist hegemony and Western rhetoric, Conrad’s insights inevitably reflect his own cultural blindness.


Heart of Darkness, Conrad, and Cultural Myopia

![Passages one, two and three: with annotations](https://media.graphassets.com/resize=width:1682,height:994/RWGr13vRPmSJ7c5zYDLw "Title")
# An Introduction
The relentless and insistent nature of the asyndeton in passage one – “the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the hate” - synthesizes a tone of veracity in Marlow’s voice as he depicts an ominous colonising experience at odds with the “unbounded power” for civilising measures promised in the writings of Kurtz. This is, for Conrad, symptomatic of his pre-modern Europe, where the morally corruptive constructs of empire were glossed over in “magnificent” peroration that had, perhaps, thrilled his bourgeois readers in the decades prior, captivating them to “tingle with enthusiasm” at the alleged redeeming capabilities of Western imperialism. Writing at a time of emerging loss in faith of colonial structures had begun to emerge, Conrad aims to relate the traumatic cognitive redress of such a transition away from a belief system that had, up until the late 19th century, formed the backbone of the West’s economic and cultural stability. It is this “humiliation” of coming to terms with the notion of unscrupulous European hegemony, paired with the “impalpable greyness” that Marlow speaks of in passage three, that depict his emotionally bereft condition, as he comes to terms with the moral failings of empire in the absence of any reassuring articulation from Kurtz. Yet in Marlow’s attempts to retrospectively reconstruct to himself what this figure represented – “he had summed up – he had judged” and thereby salvaging his faith in the man and what he may have represented, Conrad begins to implicate an innate need for absolute meaning, especially in the absence of the epistemological foundation of colonialism.

# A Crumbling Empire
Contrary to late-Victorian assumptions of an eternal Western civilisation, “the flicker” Marlow speaks of in passage one denies his – and Conrad’s - conservative readership of any such comforting longevity in its colonising endeavours. The “lightning” and “running blaze of the plain” may seem to evoke, on one level, the traditional glorification of Western empire in their insistence on an altogether grand and natural entity. Yet, these phenomena themselves are, like the short-lived fire of imperialism, fleeting - a “flash” that, whilst capable of great damage in the sinister “clouds” of an ominous immorality, is rendered paradoxically ephemeral. Indeed, that European expansion into a purportedly ‘uncivilised’ African realm is only “like” such grand forces augments its transitory quality; a Western institution that is not only distinctly temporary, but fails to deliver on even the immensity of this “sacred flame”. Marlow’s latently sardonic tone in this passage’s opening - “may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling” - foregrounds Conrad’s challenge to liberal humanist assumptions of an immutable societal progression, an inexorable ascension grounded in the “light” of civil refinement that coming out of the “river” of Western thought since the romanticised era of the “Knights”. Ironic, however, is that this “venerable stream” of supposedly enlightened ontology was itself once the outpost of Roman colonialism, situated at the “very end of the world” as a barbarous and hellish site of “cold, fog, tempests, disease, exile and death”. In characterising London as an abominable landscape at the margins of this historical society, far removed from the heart of this ancient European empire, Conrad decentralises the town and thus removes any reaffirming notion for his readership of Western cynosure. Moreover, the ubiquity of temporal qualifiers throughout this description – “nineteen hundred years ago – the other day”, “darkness was here yesterday” – subtly captures the inherently cyclical nature of imperial history, a periodicity at odds with epistemological constructs of eternal Western development as well as the problematic colonial maxim “The sun will never set on the British empire” . As such, Conrad extends little of the august sentiment for imperialism exuded by much of his late-1800’s Europe, a culture convinced of its central role in cultivating a similarly civilised light in the distant ‘Dark Continent’. Instead the author implicates the ‘problem’ of its own colonised history and the darkness and ephemerality that this entails.

# Rhetoric as Deception
In Kurtz’s writing in passage two “vibrating with eloquence”, therefore, Conrad characterises this colonial rhetoric as its own pulsating, albeit problematic, entity, a resonating ‘voice’ for Marlow that represents the “unbounded power…of words”. These “seventeen pages of close writing” seem to breathe forth a form of mystical effervescence for Marlow, a “magic current of phrases” that sweeps him up in its moving composition. The ‘spell’ of sorts he seems to be put under here, speaks to the troubling quality for such flowering commentary on imperialism to enrapture, with an underlying note of enthrallment captured in the incantatory fricative of this “vibrancy” as it begins to resonate with and enchant Marlow. This report, an “exposition of a method” for the governing interactions between coloniser and colonised, epitomizes the vaulting rhetoric of the West, the “beautiful…writing” rife with benevolent proclamations of the virtues of the imperialist endeavour. Certainly, Marlow seems to echo – albeit at times sarcastically and resentfully - the colonialist discourse of Kurtz’s work, the notion of a redeeming “idea” of empire as something to “bow down before” in veneration. Given its ability, as Kurtz posits, to “exert a power for good”, Conrad thus depicts how the West consumed and later expounded on the beguiling rhetoric produced by the likes of Kurtz. These “burning noble words”, therefore, take on a damaging quality in their ability to promote such glorified idealisms of empire, providing, as is the case in passage one, a medium through which the Manichean binary of Western light and African darkness can be sustained. Kurtz’s words clearly become a captivating timbre for Marlow, with Conrad rendering his speech in the second passage into long, meandering constructions to reflect, seemingly ironically, an ineloquent attempt to communicate to report’s articulate quality. Kurtz is, after all, a product of his words for Marlow; whilst he may not be “prepared to affirm the fellow was exactly worth the life…lost in getting to him”, the ‘voice’ remains, offering means for justifying the “unselfish belief” in an idealised, reified version of the colonial institution. What this rationale is, however, remains fittingly unvoiced – “a power for good…etc., etc.”, “‘the might as of a deity’ and so on, and so on” – leaving no illusions for the reader as to Conrad’s critique of the hollowness of such supposedly ‘redeeming’ rhetoric. In doing so, the passage suggests the tenebrous reality of these imperialist disquisitions; how, in their capacity to “soar” in the mind of reader, they beguile and deceive as to the true horrors perpetrated by empire. The “International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs” for which Kurtz writes, epitomises this obfuscatory façade of civility and enlightenment, since its formal title simultaneously erects a pretence of decorum and distances itself from the dangerous ‘Other’ of the African wilderness. This company is a condemnatory allusion from Conrad to the likes of the ‘International African Association’ and the ‘Committee for the Study of the Upper Congo’, imperial institutions which worked under a mask of philanthropic curiosity and the corrective measures of the Berlin Conference to perpetrate the slaughtering of innocent Congolese in their sordid pursuit of land. The imminent dangers of imperialist rhetoric are hence brought to the fore: the destructive nature of colonial hegemony was presented in this late-Victorian era, tragically, as morally redeemable, with the harrowing reality hidden behind an opaque veneer of hallowed Western progression.

# Existential and Moral Quandaries
So, when the entrancing “voice was gone” for Marlow in passage three, Conrad works to communicate the enervating psychological trauma of a daunting new reality without the reassurance of Western rhetoric. The perfunctory nature of this admission, in its sympathetically despondent tone, stands in stark contrast to the flowering panegyric Marlow proffered regarding Kurtz’s writing in the second passage. There is a distinct element of tragic fatality, as he bluntly blows “the candle out”, leaving the body behind in the dark room and thus figuratively extinguishing the life of this “remarkable man” and the “magnificent eloquence” that was alleged to be within. Marlow here is understandably confronted by the sudden and distinctly unglamorous pronouncement of Kurtz’s passing – “Mistah Kurtz – he dead”, and his voice as such rings of an antagonised disdain for the institution of empire, with the sibilance of “serene…smile of his sealing the unexpressed depths of his meanness” insidiously draping the manager in a cloak of malevolence. In taking his place “opposite the manager”, therefore, Marlow passively positions himself in antagonistic ideological opposition to this figure of European colonialism and all of the nefarious and avaricious principles which the man represents. He had, of course, already experienced well before this point the vile acts committed in the name of cultural enlightenment, yet there was still a latent sense of “getting to” Kurtz by journeying up river as offering the climactic vindication that could “save” Marlow’s idea of the enterprise from the sordid reality of these horrors. For Marlow, the tragic and abrupt disappearance of this possibility brings closer the impending and ominous isolation created by his trauma; though “there was a lamp” in the room with him, the Congolese wilderness outside seems to suffocate this artificial light in its “beastly, beastly” darkness, with the repetition here affirming the abominable outlook that pervades a nihilistic aspect shaped by comprehensive contempt for the failures of Western colonialism. The polluted “impalpable greyness” he endures, in its neither being only white or black, augments the conflicting tensions that characterise his confusing experience – he has “peeped over the edge” and comprehended the darkness below, yet draws back his “hesitating foot” in his unwillingness to leave behind altogether the ‘light’ of Western imperialism. Indeed, though the candle of Kurtz’s life can easily be snuffed out, the “brute force” and “aggravated murder” he has observed have cumulated into a “crop of unextinguishable regrets”, an awareness of “some knowledge of yourself”, with the second person construction allowing Conrad to ask his own 19th century readership to confront the uncivilized and contemptible darkness of empire that they, too, have observed, facilitated or denied. That the report in passage two only appears as “ominous” in the “light of later information”, the novella presents what critic Ian Watt described in his 1972 lecture as ‘delayed decoding’, where it seems Marlow comes to terms with what he has seen only after the fact, a reaction that “comes too late”, thus allowing the reader to share in his emerging, thoroughly ‘modern’ awareness of the confronting truths regarding the vacuous amorality of the imperialist enterprise. In essence, then, Marlow’s recounting in these passages, having occurred after the death of Kurtz and the subsequent dismantling of a redeeming entity to “offer a sacrifice to” in grotesque worship, comes to represent the confronting shift of Western thought that will, or needs to, occur in Conrad’s eyes, as his late-Victorian society begins to move away from its infatuation with and subsequent reliance on the glorified rhetoric of European colonialism and the rapacious hegemony it justifies.

# A New Form of Belief
By still repeatedly upholding Kurtz as “a remarkable man”, however, Marlow’s self-reassuring insistence on maintaining this idolatry figure is suggestive more universally of a human desire and search for meaning. His forlornness and moral uncertainty comes to the reader across the passages in his euphemistic and opaque ruminations on empire throughout his journey – “an unselfish belief in the idea”, “the notion of an exotic Immensity”, “the expression of some sort of belief” – as each rendition becomes increasingly abstruse and confused in its vague generalisations. There is an underlying sense, for the reader, that, in Marlow’s unsettled and melancholic “vision of greyness”, his imprecise and distorted language allows him to paradoxically believe that he can “understand better the meaning of [Kurtz’s] stare”. His increasingly epiphanic speech reflects this pursuit of cognisance, as he first forcefully, if not somewhat desperately, rejects his despondent and “careless contempt for the evanescence of all things” – “No!” – before naively asserting that “Perhaps!” he can come to “why” he feels such a connection to Kurtz’s voice. Of course, his otherwise indecipherable transition from his nihilistic state of “tepid scepticism” to the significance of Kurtz’s experience is left merely as “That”, as though it were somehow better for Marlow to be able to conclude something, rather than be left in his former state of uncertainty. In Marlow’s lamentably searching tone, Conrad makes clear a deep-seated human need for a ‘rational’ light to make transparent the muddy waters of epistemological doubt and moral ambiguity, particularly in times of such ideological uncertainty and transition. The author leaves Kurtz’s rasping final cry of “the Horror!” as purposefully inconclusive in regards to what so gripped or disgusted him in this dying moment, whether it be the moral bankruptcy of empire, the harrowing African jungle or perhaps a vision of man’s intrinsic potential for corruptive evil. So ingrained is Marlow’s need to draw meaning from Kurtz’s life as the supposed rationalising agent of an otherwise sordid colonial entity, that he can definitively claim that it “was an affirmation, a moral victory”. This determinism is ironically undercut in the sense that Marlow thinks he can know what was meant, yet as a result he imbues the cry with his own interpretation and thus moves further away from an objective ‘truth’, whatever that may have been. In this way, Conrad articulates to a Western readership - still firmly entrenched in the ‘eternal’ structures of empire - that, contrary to a traditional notion of an objective truth or universal meaning, human language and experience is inherently subjective and oft-impenetrable, often unable to be made comfortably transparent. The rhetorical writings of Europeans like Kurtz providing “future guidance” for Marlow and other expeditioners thus become vessels for removing these colonisers from the confronting and traumatic destruction of imperialism, as they satisfy man’s internal journey to find reassuring moral validity for their endeavours. In doing so, these passages attest to Conrad’s pre-modern narrative structure that sought to rend the comforting ontological systems of imperialism and thus position a Blackwood’s readership to challenge their own culpability and belief in the ‘redemptive’ morals of empire.


Marlow's Internal Journey, Through the West, Towards Kurtz

![Passages one, two and three: with annotations](https://media.graphassets.com/resize=width:1524,height:970/568IKRGgTVmuCs8zoTwY)
# An Introduction
The “intolerably excessive shrieking” in the second passage – in its evocation of something irrationally “appalling” and jarring to the West’s comprehension and sensibilities – reveals the limits of understanding, the potential for this raw, untapped emotion to elude Western reliance on rationalism as a means of interpreting humanity. In the figure of Kurtz, his portrayal as a “prodigy…of science, and progress” epitomises the moral hypocrisy at the core of colonialism, its insistence on carrying forth the ‘torch’ of its learned wisdoms to map out the “darkness” of the African continent. So, in this rapacious underbelly masked by the ornate rhetoric of empire, Conrad prefaces the difficulties of moving past what “remains” of these institutions and interrogating these systems in a thoroughly sceptical and modern fashion.

# The Fog of Colonisation
The nebulous “white fog” of passage two that descends upon the river at sunrise conveys how nature, in Conrad’s eyes, can impose a decisively opaque film over the colonising experience. This “warm and clammy” mist of an uncomfortably sweltering, if not suffocating, Congolese jungle paradoxically becomes thicker even as the “blazing little ball of the sun” rises, contradicting such a motif’s immediate association with enlightenment and learned comprehension, as it can only “hang” above the landscape, powerless to thwart the tenebrous submersion into a place “more blinding than night”. Set against this fragility, the reader is presented with a depiction of nature engendered with an exotic allure, as Marlow’s voice appears to wax poetically, and at times mournfully, in his descriptions of the African wilderness – “through the dim stir”, “through the faint sounds of that lamentable courtyard”. The rhythmic impress at work here evokes a quality of replenishing vitality, one that exists “beyond the fence” of the colonialist station, able to penetrate across to the reader “through” the otherwise wilting and decaying pilgrimage before it, be it the figures “strolling about listlessly” or the “hurt nigger” that moans “feebly” in Marlow’s vicinity. This resonating captivity contrasts with the jarring and brusque “little fat man” that emerges in the second passage, whose bewildered cry of “What is the meaning---?” is suggestive of a Western insistence on forcing an unequivocal form of rationalism onto the pulsating entity of the jungle, a seemingly vain attempt, given the way Conrad works to sustain this landscape as defying ontological transparency in these passages. Indeed, the language of the unbounded that Conrad weaves into the “complaining clamour”, that rends the sinister tranquillity imposed by the “white shutter”, speaks to a forlorn and distinctly human anguish that appears to have “soared” beyond the comprehensible, an “infinite desolation” within which an unquantifiable, and therefore incommunicable, sorrow is embroiled. These pilgrims aboard the steamer present themselves to the reader, in this instance, as confounded by the “sheer unexpectedness” of this melancholic howl, left disconcerted by a “cry” that seems to defy common sense and reason as it comes at them “from all sides”. Writing for a readership that no doubt still subscribed to the notion of sight or human vision as gesturing towards a form of objective reality, Conrad clearly works to suggest otherwise, that perhaps the European persistence of upholding logic and rhetoric falls short of something more in the human experience, a more emotional and longing cry of pain. As in this passage, it is the reverberating sounds that defy any sort of translucent meaning – in their suggestion of human agony – that “filled” the ears of the colonisers; their vision however, can observe only a “blurred” world that seems to go “nowhere”. In this way, the complex and inscrutable quality of the African jungle, from which the harrowingly humane voice of suffering emanates, attests to the shortcomings of Western sensibilities: a desire to reduce the muddied “fog” of nature – and thus by extension human nature – to an unequivocal and rational vision of things, but a desire for grand narratives and rationality that belies the inherent pains and ambiguities of humanity.

# Western Justice and Morality
And so, in the face of such destabilising threats to Western ontological convictions, the “woman…blindfolded” in passage one serves as an insidious image of a willingness to obfuscate this more sordid reality. In an effort to uphold the systems of late-19th century empire, there is a troubling sense of the figure’s enthusiasm in her lack of sight, as she is depicted as “carrying the lighted torch”, actively participating in bringing forth the symbolic enlightenment of European colonialism. In many ways, this moment of wilful dissemination of the ‘Enlightenment’ of Western thought is fitting, given how the sketch is a latent evocation of the goddess of justice Astraea, as Conrad maintains a message of a corruptive, rather than nurturing, civilized morality inherent to this form of imperialism. The reader, over the course of passages one to three, becomes aware of the purposeful parallels Conrad draws here, as the Intended’s “fair hair” - set against her despondent, if not at times naively hopeful tone – echoes the “stately” yet “sombre” quality of the painting. The lexicon of ideological optimism that pervades this passage – the repeated desire to “understand” and “know” what her husband intended – gestures towards an unequivocal belief in the potential for logical triumph, the potential for unambiguous knowledge by which she can progress forward. Her efforts, however, are undermined, rendered vain, as she can only speculate on how she “would have treasured” Kurtz’s every action. There is a clear subtext of idolatry, here, as her insistence on her now deceased betrothed as some immeasurably valuable figure upholds him as a dubious deity, someone to be “believed in…more than any one on earth”. This sentiment is captured in her being likened to a “tragic and familiar Shade”, protecting Kurtz on his figurative journey to Elysium and thereby engaging in a form of apotheosis, transforming him into an insidious and grotesque form of god. Yet the fragile longing of her outstretched arm and “powerless charms” renders this symbol of worship hollow, as the Intended is left to stretch her “pale”, lifeless hands “as if after a retreating figure”, reaching out for something definitively insubstantial and ephemeral. Given the spectral female role throughout the novella, this image could, on one level, be read as Conrad’s patronising tendency to place women outside of the confronting and opaque locus of imperialism, implying that they are too sensitive to fully comprehend the moral bankruptcy of empire and the enervating mist of the African jungle. Yet more universally, this passage portends the hollow veneration of, and deceptive rhetoric “draped” protectively around, colonisers like Kurtz, whose redeeming “goodness” in life can only result, for Conrad, in the idea of European colonialism being rendered at once transient and vacuous, despite attempts to extend it into perpetuity and thereby providing, however dubiously, a comforting ideological system “to live with”.

# The Spiritual Wasteland
Yet even with this more fragile and tenebrous reality that befalls the Intended, Marlow’s largely patronising inflection in this passage initially rings with a disgust for her fugacious veneration of Kurtz. She is, in this moment, quite clearly distraught, as the “mournful” quality of her voice, in conjunction with her at times fragmented and incoherent speech, speaks to a lamentable sadness to her aspect, a wistfulness with which Conrad asks us to sympathise. In contrast to such melancholy, the way Marlow “hastily” drives forth the conversation and his almost comically echoing remarks – “His words will remain”, “his example too. Yes, his example” – conveys a sardonic tone that seems to generate the impression of his detached antagonism to the Intended’s emotionally-fraught yet desperate admiration of Kurtz. The hollow rhythm of ennui in his voice, on one level, seems to allow Marlow to distance himself from such ruminations on this now-dead figure, a veneration that has been rendered vacuous and myopic in light of the harrowing journey of epiphanic enlightenment he has endured regarding the dark opacity of human experiences and man’s capacity for corruptive hegemony. Perhaps on a deeper level, too, he appears insistent on maintaining a pretence of moral objectivity and thus can remain beyond the supposedly irrational and fragile world of human emotion in which Kurtz’s betrothed finds herself. Yet, Conrad works to disrupt Marlow’s pretence of a cohesive civility with the passage’s development, as the author communicates a subtext of parallels between Marlow’s own veneration of Kurtz and that of the Intended. The “chill grip” that latches onto him as her blind adoration comes to the fore stands as a cold, morbid image of the impending realisation that seems to dawn on him here: having already held up Kurtz as a potential redeeming figure of European colonialism, Marlow no doubt sees his own visionless ontological subscription to the rhetoric of empire in the Intended’s anguish here, as the tonal transition in his voice from condemning certitude to “shakily” extending a “Don’t” by way of interjection crafts an underlying note of hesitancy in the passage, and Conrad erodes, therefore, any notions of a pompous disposition. So, in this moment, not only does Marlow begin to comprehend the naivety of his formerly romanticised and bombastic visions of Western empire as potentially redeemable but as a consequence, Conrad’s perception of the fundamentally cyclical nature of so-called human progression comes to the fore. Counter to liberal humanist assumptions asserting an inexorable European ascension towards a set of objective moral ideals, and despite Marlow having travelled up river into the depths of his own ‘darkness’, the novella presents, in the Intended a troubling conclusion of epistemological stagnancy, one that Marlow himself ensures by ‘sacrificing’ the truth and doing the one thing he finds “detestable”: lying, in this case, about Kurtz’s “last word”. And so, just as the text opens with a “haze” that settles over the Nellie “at rest”, in this moment with the Intended, Conrad affirms both the circular path of colonialism’s deception as well as the psychological challenges closed within the “black bank of clouds” that lead into “the heart of an immense darkness”.


On The Pall of Western Rhetoric and Colonialism

![Passages one, two and three: with annotations](https://media.graphassets.com/resize=width:1867,height:986/NXrPA2boRXi8FQzc2RWp)
# An Introduction
As Marlow emphatically declares the “moral victory” of Kurtz’s existence and the “wisdom” and “truth” interlaced in his work, his words recreate the lexicon of late-19th century Western rationalism, one that insistently sought to sustain its own projection towards some fixed point of ideological certainty. Yet Marlow’s own convictions are far from resolute, as is evident in his own vacillation between a detachment from the hollow and ineffectual “air of pretence” and an emergent comprehension of a universal humanity between himself and the African subjects, seen through the “eyes” of the jungle that seem to reach out and collapse the physical chasm between the ‘boat’ of colonial certitude and the previously “impenetrable” jungle. So, as the “choking, warm, stifling” fog sets over passage two, Conrad figuratively evokes the upending of Western ‘vision’ and its inherent determination to hold true on imperial claims of learned truths and enlightenment. 

# Impending Apathy
The lethargic rhythm and droll melancholy of passage one’s opening – “I strolled up. There was no hurry” – evinces a note of cursory indifference in Marlow, one that foreshadows his growing disillusionment with the rapacious underbelly of the late-Victorian colonial enterprise. Set against an intervention crafted by a redeeming vision of enlightenment, this “torch” of moral authority is subverted, itself becoming the “flame” that enacts destruction, rather than cultural growth. In Marlow’s eyes, he finds himself antagonised from the supposedly civil imperatives of colonialism, principles that, as seen in this passage, rapidly descend into the perfunctory horror of “A nigger…being beaten nearby”. The staccato, blunt fricatives work here to jar against and cut through the lingering ideals of empire, creating a bitingly crude aural quality that both reinforces Marlow’s apathy towards the colonising experience as well as the brutal and atavistic core of this expansion. This darker subtext of immorality is one that does not allow itself to be openly paraded beyond Marlow’s retelling, unlike the “native mats”, “shields”, “knives” and “trophies” that hang ostentatiously in the agent’s room, rendering the display a turgid shrine to the glories of European intervention. However, such relics latently attest to the way in which the West takes hold of ‘the Other’, deforming the African subject and its culture into something to be itemised and collected, or else savagely beaten for its alleged misdemeanours. This squares in many ways with the ‘grand narrative’ of empire – the pilgrims in possession of the ‘native’, yet the sibilant “hissing” of the flames and the “screeching” that painfully grates for readers erodes any lasting “philanthropic pretence” as to the morally redemptive heart of the supposed ‘mission civilisatrice’. Instead, it is an enterprise that inflicts suffering and shackles, rather than liberates, the colonised. So, as Marlow approaches “the back of two men”, Conrad offers an image that captures physically what his sardonic voice insists on syntactically throughout the passage. Like the ship “firing into the continent” aimlessly that greets Marlow on his arrival in Africa, this station resorts to a state of “backbiting”, “intriguing” and “plotting”, plagued by a decided lack of progress, a form of stagnancy, as the present continuous verbs suggest. As such, in the first passage Marlow appears to distance himself from the attendant sense of chaos and destruction that is embroiled within the place, a form of hegemony decidedly absent from the frame narrator’s earlier eulogising panegyric to the West, and to empire more generally, as a morally righteous entity. 

# Marlow and Voice
However, Marlow’s voice passively isolates him from empire, and his empathy for the “extreme grief” of the Congolese strikes a chord of emotional connection between them, suggesting a commonality that dismantles the West’s ‘Othering’ of the African landscape and its people. Whilst there are aspects of Marlow’s narration that play into these traditional binary depictions of coloniser and colonised – the lingering note of “they” being a foreign and therefore threatening “savage” – he becomes increasingly cognisant of the alluring and “irresistible impression” of the nature and the subject bound within it, as the sibilance tacitly augments the beguiling aspect of it, especially in contrast to the blunt beating given out in passage one. Indeed, set against the defunct and decaying station of the first passage, this passage runs the gamut of the unbounded extremes of emotion –  an “unrestrained”, “wild”, “violent” “sorrow” – a lexicon which procures both the lively humanity at play here as well as the potential for such emotions to evade suffocation by a Western insistence on rationalism, on rendering the equivocal definitive. Marlow’s tone here waxes poetically in his ruminations on this “great passion let loose”, as he gesture towards that which is “human” and therefore beyond the Manichean dichotomies of the European and African subject that shape Western rhetoric. Contrary to the purported infinite reaches of the West – be it in the imperial maxim “The sun will never set on the British empire” or the projection of Europe as the “beginning of an interminable waterway” – there are , the author implies, limits to this vision of the world, a vision that fittingly becomes, in this passage, “buried miles deep in a pile of wool”, as Conrad offers an image of its own potential blindness to the ambiguities of the human experience that subvert the imperial enterprise and its assumptions of ideological absolutism. Indeed, where the West’s invasion atrophies both its own endeavours and the African subject, the jungle, a recurring motif for the author of human nature, takes the wounded “without a sound…into its bosom again”, with the graceful aural palette of this statement pairing with the image of a fecund Mother Nature to impose a message of nurturing benevolence, rather than destruction. Ultimately, therefore, as Marlow sees himself becoming all the more disenfranchised with the sordid reality of his pilgrim mission, he simultaneously works to penetrate through the muddy waters of his ideological disillusionment and thus map out for his listeners on board The Nellie the potential of a universal humanity.

# Kurtz As Redemptive
Paradoxically, however, even Marlow finds himself in the shroud of his own ‘fog’ of delusion, as he yearnfully holds on to the “moral victory” of Kurtz’s work as means of rectifying his own ideological despair in the face of his conflicting experience. The further he drifts away from the fortitude and certainty contained within Western rhetoric across the passages, the more pronounced his tonal shift becomes, transitioning from patronising mockery – “but as to effectually lifting a finger – oh, no.” – to a wistful optimism and then finally here to desperately proclaiming the definitive way in which Kurtz “had summed up” and “judged”. His zealously idyllic portrayal of Kurtz having some sort of “conviction” is echoed in the pervasive deployment of the perfect past construction “had”, which, in conjunction with his perfunctory summations that dominate the opening paragraphs of passage three, communicates Marlow’s desire for something left untouched and unpolluted by the otherwise grotesque ‘present’ of empire which he occupies. Of course, how this “glimpsed truth” manifests itself, the reason “why” Marlow so fervently proclaims his loyalty to Kurtz, is left purposefully cloaked by the pall of his syntactical imprecision. In doing so, Conrad not only defies literary convention, which insists, more commonly, on a final and lasting sense of closure, he also augments the ominous quality captured in the “vibrating” fricatives of this “revolt”. In seemingly worshipping the ‘voice’ of Kurtz, even the hollow and insubstantial “echo of magnificent eloquence” that remains, Marlow becomes a tragic “last disciple” of Kurtz, an adherent follower of ‘the Word’ of this quasi-spiritual figure, however morally dubious his doctrine was. This is understandable in some sense, given the “vision of greyness” which has settled over his psyche, an impending “careless contempt” that offers neither the supposedly pure enlightenment of imperial rhetoric nor the absolute ‘blackness’ of having “stepped over the edge”. It is this enervating nihilism that leaves him to “totter” about the streets upon his return, needing to “nurse up [his] strength”, and through this image Conrad suggests that colonialism is destructive on two levels: not only does it orchestrate the physical violence implied throughout the first passage, it also wears down on the psychological space of those who participate in it. Instead of arriving at some panacea of certitude or ‘cracked-nut’ truth that could resolve his fractured certitude, Marlow appears to earnestly convince himself of the capacity for Kurtz to vindicate the “evanescence of all things” that looms over him. As such, this extract becomes one of the darkest in the test, ironically, given how dutifully Marlow proclaims to see the ‘light’ of Kurtz’s vision of humanity, the stare “wide enough to embrace the whole universe”. Yet in such absolute vernacular, his insistence on Kurtz capturing “all wisdom” and “all truth”, Marlow actively glosses over the inherent complexities that Conrad communicates, subtextually, to his late-Victorian readership. Even as Marlow recounts his journey up the river in a form of retrospective reflection and mental catharsis, by the final pages of the novella, he is still prepared to uphold Kurtz as a redemptive beacon for the otherwise impenetrable ‘fog’ of the colonial enterprise, something he can “bow down before and offer a sacrifice to…”.

Marlow, Kurtz and The Congo Redemption

**Notes from the 29th of April-7th of May**

And so, my time at Purdue, these wonderful months of my life, come to an end. The past week or so has been a severely emotional experience, but of the most _beautiful_ kind: even, or perhaps because of, the immense sadness I felt.

I had my final exam on Friday night, and by the time I emerged on Saturday for a breath of exam-free air, the campus had already well and truly cleared out. Restaurants were closing for the Summer, only a few dining halls remained open, and most importantly the campus streets - only a few days ago flooded with people - now were barren. In many ways, it was only fitting that the following afternoon I would depart from Purdue, leaving it in much the same way that I had found it. But of course, whilst there were similarities in arrival and departure, on so many levels they couldn't have been any different. For one, I donned shorts and a T-shirt in place of thick coats and trackies. Of course, more centrally though, I had grown to love the place, to love the people.

In July of last year, I had selected Purdue as the location for my study exchange on a partial whim. I knew them well because of their prowess in college basketball, and I knew they had a good (aerospace) engineering school. This, combined with the fact that I could find mirrors of all the required units I needed to take, was good enough a reason to pick it. How very fortunate I am that I chose this place, because I could seriously not think of a better fit. I. Love. Purdue. Would I consider coming back here for post-graduate study as some have asked? Potentially, but it's a tall ask. In reflection, it is almost impossible for me to decipher how much of this affection stems from the intrinsic qualities of the college, and how much of it stems from the nature of a study exchange experience (namely its temporary nature) and the wonderful souls I met during that time. Half a year in West Lafayette is one thing. 5 years a completely other matter.

In the [first article](https://chumbers.io/content/ep-0-a-prelude) of this series, I spoke about the rushed nature of departing for exchange from my childhood home, from which my family would shortly be moving out of. So, too, was the experience of leaving Purdue chaotic and frantic. After going out late on Friday (see below), and spending much of Saturday saying farewell to the final few people on campus, I found myself on Sunday morning with a departure time of mid-afternoon and an obscene amount of stuff to do. All my bags were effectively packed, but I had to do a full clean of most of the apartment[^1] and throw out/donate anything I wouldn't be taking with me.

Somehow, with the aid of some very special people, I managed to get it done. Whilst it did feel kind of terrible to be throwing out good linen and other such items, my conscience was slightly spared by being able to offload a heap of remaining groceries and other things to others who were sticking around on campus a little longer than I was. Very quickly, the apartment looked just the way I had found it back on a snowy Winter's day in January - bare, empty and vaguely clean. Seeing it like that made a bit emotional honestly. I had spent most every moment in that place feeling the experience that it would be there forever, even when of course I factually knew this to be false. But now it was really gone - for good.

One item I did not know how to properly dispose was a basketball that I had collected from the Purdue Gym lost property a couple of months ago. It was in really nice condition, so there was no way I was going to throw it out. Then again, I had precisely zero spare space in my luggage, let alone for an inflated basketball. I ended up coming up with a perfect work-around. One of the guys who came to pick up groceries was someone that I had met and become good friends with in the space of the preceding two weeks. He liked playing basketball, and so what better thing to do than write him a little note on it and give it to him as a parting gift? Again, cue more emotions.
![Probably the first and last time someone will get a signed basketball from me...](https://res.cloudinary.com/df6vf0noc/image/upload/v1702705531/ep-14-goodbye/IMG-20230507-WA0018_pd7sof.jpg)
Despite how completely overwhelmed with emotion I was, there was not much time to properly contemplate it. I had about an hour to get down to the bus stop and have lunch. Though I had managed to offload one of two suitcases to a friend to take to Melbourne with them, I still had to get a huge suitcase, duffel bag, backpack and camera bag about half a mile down the road to the campus centre, which left me pretty damn sweaty.

Counting down the final minutes at Purdue was utterly surreal. Regarding how one should feel in such moments, I always find it hard to compute anything of relevance for a future that I have no touchstone for. Perhaps that is why when, right on time, the shuttle bus pulled in and the call to board was given, it all it me in one fell swoop and left me a bit of a mess. This was it. I was probably leaving this place, these people, behind forever. I think the driver felt bad for me and so gave me a few extra minutes to vaguely collect myself, but eventually his patience ran out and the shuttle bus pulled away from the curb.

Soon Purdue was a barely visible point in the rear-view mirror.

Soon Lafayette was left well behind and replaced by endless fields of corn.

Soon I found myself in an airport terminal.

And soon America - with it Indiana, Purdue, and my life from the previous months - disappeared beneath the clouds.

## On Friendships and Goodbyes

One thing of which I was proud was taking the time to meet up in the last dozen days or so here at Purdue with the people I am now humbled to call friends. As I mentioned [previously](https://chumbers.io/content/ep-13-when-harry-met-sally#studying-abroad), even with final exams upcoming, I still had sufficient spare time to make this happen. One of the sticking points however was that, for many of the international students. once their last exam was done they were leaving. Gone forever. In part, this was because the deadline for moving out was a mere _day_ after the possible completion of finals.

I thought it would be nice, especially with a good camera handy, to take a picture for my journal with each person or persons that I hung out with. You can get a glimpse of the full list in [this post](https://www.instagram.com/p/Cr_fl8ZLhdG/?img_index=1) I made to Instagram, however here is one such collage:
![Top: two fellow Australians! Middle left: candid, after my final exam. Middle right, bottom: two very smart guys both doing PhDs that made me consider following suite.](https://res.cloudinary.com/df6vf0noc/image/upload/v1702617757/ep-14-goodbye/Faces_of_Purdue-6_ztutnc.png)

Saying goodbye to some of the most kind people I have so far met in my life was a very challenging prospect. The road ahead is unknown, but even months down the road from now, I know undoubtedly that I will still feel extremely blessed to have had the opportunity to cross paths with such folk. It is truly something that I do not wish to take for granted; not now, not ever.

I shared so many laughs, so many sonorous memories with these friends of mine, and quite clearly, then, a cause of my sadness on leaving is the signal of these times coming to an end. Call it a painful form of nostalgia. But there is a secondary layer to this, one that is distinctly future-looking. Namely, it is the concern of "_What if that is the last of that particular experience with that particular person?_" Because despite best intentions, and I'm sure your own life course to this point will intersect here, there is no guarantee that a connection will survive the corrosive acid of time and distance. And this is a very harrowing thought. We are, to be sure, at an advantage living in the times we do, where a fleeting friendship like this _might_ be caught in the safety net of digital messaging platforms and allowed to propagate. But _might_ does not imply _will_. It certainly does not imply _probable_.

This is why I think such farewells can often be legitimate troughs on the landscape of our happiness. We find ourselves buffeted from both sides of our wandering mind - nostalgia for a past that is lost, trepidation of a future where ties become cut. It is the emotional equivalent of a rock and a hard place. **But**, and this was something I had direct experience of these past few days, a low point on the function of our happiness need not correlate to a low point on the function of our well-being or fulfilment. Because despite finding myself this week at best in a latent state of sadness, it was unequivocally one of the best weeks of my life. Certainly one of the most meaningful. And precisely owing to the pain of farewells.

None of the above remarks deterred me from insisting to everyone I parted with that they stay in touch and message me whenever they had news. Only time will tell whether that holds true. Or, perhaps there is some benefit to these friendships fading away. We grow so attached to things in life. Letting go every now and again, recognising and appreciating that things are fleeting, mightn't be such a bad thing after all.

## Fitting Farewells

On the topic of saying goodbye, it is only appropriate that I make specific reference to a few of the more memorable of such occurrences.

### Alarmingly Good!

[Earlier in the semester](https://chumbers.io/content/ep-8-winding-down#on-the-nightlife-in-lafayette), I had been invited around to some Colombian friends of mine and they had made some Colombian food for us to partake in. I felt it was only right that I had them over to mine and returned the favour.

So it was that on Wednesday morning[^2] I spent several hours going down to Walmart and acquiring the necessary groceries I would need to prepare the dinner I had in mind - a crispy skin fish with bean ragu - and dessert - pavlova. It turns out that an apartment with four guys in it also doesn't have much by the way of basic cooking supplies and equipment, so I had to get these too. Seemed a bit of a waste to, for instance, by a whisk that was probably only going to be used once, but oh well.

In any case, the process of preparing the food and getting the place cleaned up was quite enjoyable. Admittedly, I had to have two cracks at the pavlova, since I spent about 30 minutes whisking the first batch of egg whites before concluding that they had been sufficiently polluted by egg yolk and therefore needed to be tossed. My wrists and forearms were suffering by the end of this. Hand-whisking is not fun. The main course came together much more fluently. However, we had no proper cooking oil, meaning I was left with non-stick spray as the alternative. Also, I had very little experience using the stove top and consequently had very little understanding of what temperature each rotation of the dial corresponded to. As such, upon dropping the fish onto the pan I managed to set off the smoke alarm in our apartment repeatedly. Whoops. With the assistance of my roommates and guests opening the windows and using a tray to swipe smoke out, we managed to get everything under control. And a wonderful, wonderful meal was enjoyed!
![The finished products.](https://res.cloudinary.com/df6vf0noc/image/upload/v1702626245/ep-14-goodbye/dinner_imvdc1.jpg)
Whilst it is clearly a lot of work to organise and host a dinner, I think an experience of like this makes me realise _why_ perhaps so many people take such great pleasure in doing it. It was a lovely way to say farewell to the group.

### A Night's Tale

The final two nights at Purdue were, fittingly, two of the most memorable. On the Friday night, having finished my final exam, I went out with a group - half exchange students, half Purdue students that had just graduated - and we went to what had become my favourite bar at this point - The G.O.A.T. in Lafayette.

Because it is located off of campus, you get a mix of college students and regular citizens alike. Which means that when stuff goes down, it can really go down. For instance, whilst sitting at the bar in conversation, a guy about two feet behind started pushing and shoving another. Which lead to security coming and trying to escort hin. Which lead to him getting into a brief fist-fight with the security. Nice! Though by this time I think most in the group were still enjoying themselves[^3], this was a good a reason as any to start vacating the premises before anything escalated further.

As for Saturday night. Well, I actually went on a date. Kind of spontaneous, and potentially hard to reconcile given that I was flying to a wholly separate continent the next day, but it seemed very much in the spirit of maximising this unique journey. It also, happily, gave me a chance to do things that I had been meaning to do all semester:

First, to do an obligatory run through the fountain in the Engineering Mall.
![](https://res.cloudinary.com/df6vf0noc/image/upload/v1702710249/ep-14-goodbye/IMG_4276.JPG_axmiy1.jpg)
Secondly, I managed to find a restricted top-floor on the Civil Engineering building which, with everyone gone for the semester, was surprisingly left open. It gave some really nice views looking out across the whole Purdue campus.
![](https://res.cloudinary.com/df6vf0noc/image/upload/v1702710376/ep-14-goodbye/IMG-20230507-WA0014_zbicfz.jpg)
Seeming to epitomise the way in which I wanted to engage with this experience, this was a really special way to conclude the chapter of my life at Purdue.

## Finals Week

It would be wholly unfitting to not finish up with the concluding details of my academic life at Purdue. This week was Finals Week; unlike Monash, where exams are spread out over some 3 weeks, American colleges do it all in under 1. Fair enough, too, given the discrepancy in the marks' weighting to your overall grade.

Happily, the figurative plane landed safely on the three final exams that I had. Given that they were all scheduled (somewhat annoyingly) for the evening, my revision for each essentially consisted of pouring rapidly over past exams and content during the morning and afternoon of the day of each, giving myself a few hours before it commenced to wind down and refresh. An optimal strategy - absolutely not. But it went just fine.

For the semester, I ended up finishing with two A's and two A+'s. And for these latter two, control systems and integrated circuit design, I really wished Monash didn't adopt a pass/fail system since I scored well above a 90 and would have correspondingly receive a nice WAM boost, should they have been accounted for.

## A Note From Me

If you have made it this far, thank you. I have thoroughly enjoyed the process of writing these weekly summaries the past many months, and if you have ready any of them, even a single sentence, I am beyond grateful for giving me an audience to reflect to. This does mark of course the final instalment in this little travel series, however it will surely not be the last such piece that I write. And when that time comes, if I can count you amongst my readership once more, I would be so very happy.

Thanks again.
![](https://res.cloudinary.com/df6vf0noc/image/upload/v1702711250/ep-14-goodbye/000011330035_z78vng.jpg)

## Footnotes
[^1]: Exacerbated by the fact that all my other roommates had already left.

[^2]: Noting that I still had two exams to go at this point - Thursday and Friday.

[^3]: It was May 5th i.e. Cinco de Mayo, so once again it was a Latin music night at the bar.


HEART OF DARKNESS

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