An interchange of attributes connects the 2 encounters: the overturned truck feels like the ‘carcass of a few animal’; the skeletal natives in simple terms like ‘bundles of acute angles’ (Conrad 1988: 19–21). whereas imperial materialism confers animate or zoological features on equipment, it imposes an inert mechanical geometry at the human. Grimly obtrusive between sufferers of empire, an identical tactics however threaten its brokers, too. Marlow’s subsequent stumble upon is with the ‘amazing’, dandified determine of the Company’s leader accountant, instantly reminding him of ‘a hairdresser’s dummy’ (Conrad 1988: 21). this can be acceptable, for the accountant is his first resource of knowledge in regards to the ‘chief of the internal Station’, Kurtz, who seems to be one of those dummy, too – no longer the presumed ‘emissary of pity, and technological know-how, and growth’ yet ultimately a ‘hollow sham’, devoted purely to ‘something that's particularly profitable’: the ivory exchange (Conrad 1988: 28, 67). by myself and bereft of beliefs, Kurtz had ‘looked inside of’ and ‘gone mad’, discovering the wasteland ‘echoed loudly inside him simply because he used to be hole on the middle’ (Conrad 1988: sixty five, 58). the outline makes him a prototype for a protracted line of Conradian ‘hollow males’ or semi-automata. This starts as early as 1896 in ‘An Outpost of development’ – a Congo story greatly looking forward to middle of Darkness – with imperative figures who ‘lived like blind males in a wide room, conscious in simple terms of what got here in touch with them (and that purely imperfectly), yet not able to determine the final element of items’ (Conrad 1998: 253). Later examples contain the spiritually bankrupt mining engineer, Gould, in Nostromo, and the aptly named financier, de Barral, in likelihood (1913). Verloc, within the undercover agent (1907), is one other, defined as akin to ‘a mechanical figure’, with ‘an automaton’s absurd air of being conscious of the equipment within him’ (Conrad 1967: 162) now not strangely, Conrad himself expressed a weird curiosity in marionettes – ‘especially these of the outdated sort, with wires, thick as my little finger, popping out of the head of the top’ – defined as ‘superhuman, interesting’ in a letter of 1897 (Taxidou 1998: 87). As a tone of gothic anticipation in its early pages indicates, Conrad’s matters in center of Darkness expand way past the reifying results fabric pursuits impose on either coloniser and colonised. Marlow’s trip into what ‘had turn into a spot of darkness’ starts with an ‘eerie’ come across within the Company’s ecu workplace with ‘uncanny and fateful’ figures. ‘Often some distance away’, he remembers, i presumed of those , guarding the door of Darkness, knitting black wool as for a hot pall, one introducing, introducing regularly to the unknown, the opposite scrutinizing the cheery and silly faces with unconcerned outdated eyes. Ave! previous knitter of black wool. Morituri te salutant. [Hail! people who are approximately to die salute you. ] now not lots of these she checked out ever observed her back. (Conrad 1988: 12–14) If no longer a god, definitely of the traditional Fates are in attendance right here, weaving Marlow’s future out of black wool: an creation to a ‘place of darkness’ akin to Freud’s 18 The Edinburgh better half to Twentieth-Century Literatures in English expected access into ‘infernal areas’ and into negotiations with the deities who inhabit them.