any inklings of mortality Marlowe remembers in the storytelling. All religion is concerned with mortality, and Conrad's religious experience is no exception. This is the tale of a trip to retrieve a dying man, Kurtz; with growing irony one realizes that dying is one of the most everyday activities of the region. Within a page of Marlowe's telling of the unfortunate soldiers and customs officials, his southbound vessel passes a French man-of-war shooting cannons at the impenetrable jungle, with a crew "dying of fever at the rate of three a-day" (41). Hardly a moment later, the young Swedish steamboat captain transporting him the first leg upcountry casually remarks, "the other day I took up a man who hanged himself on the road. He was a Swede, too" (42). When Marlowe is finally ashore, things do not improve from there. To avoid the distressing sight of black prisoners, presumably criminals, being worked to death, Marlowe retreats to a shaded grove - finding that:
this was the place where some of the helpers had withdrawn to die. They were dying s
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