His remark did not seem at all surprising. It was just like Marlow.
It was accepted in silence. No one took the trouble to grunt even; and
presently he said, very slow--"I was thinking of very old times, when
the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago--the other day
. . . . Light came out of this river since--you say Knights? Yes; but
it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the
clouds. We live in the flicker--may it last as long as the old earth
keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday. Imagine the feelings
of a commander of a fine--what d'ye call 'em?--trireme in the
Mediterranean, ordered suddenly to the north; run overland across the
Gauls in a hurry; put in charge of one of these craft the legionaries--a
wonderful lot of handy men they must have been, too--used to build,
apparently by the hundred, in a month or two, if we may believe what we
read. Imagine him here--the very end of the world, a sea the colour
of lead, a sky the colour of smoke, a kind of ship about as rigid as a
concertina--and going up this river with stores, or orders, or what you
like. Sand-banks, marshes, forests, savages,--precious little to eat
fit for a civilized man, nothing but Thames water to drink. No Falernian
wine here, no going ashore. Here and there a military camp lost in
a wilderness, like a needle in a bundle of hay--cold, fog, tempests,
disease, exile, and death--death skulking in the air, in the water, in
the bush. They must have been dying like flies here. Oh, yes--he did
it. Did it very well, too, no doubt, and without thinking much about
it either, except afterwards to brag of what he had gone through in his
time, perhaps. They were men enough to face the darkness. And perhaps he
was cheered by keeping his eye on a chance of promotion to the fleet at
Ravenna by and by, if he had good friends in Rome and survived the awful
climate. Or think of a decent young citizen in a toga--perhaps too
much dice, you know--coming out here in the train of some prefect, or