HOD to page 70

Wow. This was an important section. Basically, Marlow's helmsman gets speared I'm the side during this battle (and dies) as he tries to shoot at the attacking natives. The people on the boat, who (or is it whom?) Marlow's calls pilgrims, shoot at the natives for a while and then the steam whistle blows and the natives scurry off. Marlow calls his shipmates "pilgrims" sarcastically/ironically because pilgrim implies that they are the first to go to a land and are there for a strongly religious purpose, when they are actually doing the opposite of that. Then Marlow throws his dead helmsman overboard so as to prevent the crew from wanting to eat him. He becomes really depressed after the attack because he thinks that Kurtz must be dead and he goes into this whole rant with the people on the ship to whom he is telling this story about Kurtz and evil and humanity etc.. They get to the station and meet two people. One of them is the man who left the annotated book (who, as it turns out, is Russian) and I'm not really share who the second man is. He wears patched clothes and Marlow calls him a harlequin. Anyway, Marlow talks to the Russian for a while and finds out that the Russian is irrationally devoted to Kurtz, finds out that kurtz has been very ill twice, hears more stories about kurtz's incredible personal nature and finds out that Kurtz frequently wanders off into the forest and pits tribes against each other and kills many in order to get ivory. This section is full of imagery, metaphors, motifs, etc.. But, most importantly, Marlow talks openly and directly about Kurtz, evil, exploitation, adventure, death, hell, the devil, and all of the underlying topics of the novel. I like this book!