In HEART OF DARKNESS, there is a constant and emphatic imagery of
(matched in Eliot), of whispers, of shades and shadows, of twilight greyness, of formlessness and impalpability, of inertia, paralysis, unfulfilment and aimlessness. In a native village beside a river, an "infernal stream," (p. 130 in Bantam; p.156 in Signet Classics) at the heart of the jungle, Marlow comes to Kurtz, "the hollow sham," the man who came from Europe full of an empty, rhetorical idealism, which collapsed under the force of the savage, barbaric "darkness."