And from right to left along the lighted shore moved a wild and
gorgeous apparition of a woman.
"She walked with measured steps, draped in striped and fringed cloths,
treading the earth proudly, with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous
ornaments. She carried her head high; her hair was done in the shape of a
helmet; she had brass leggings to the knee, brass wire gauntlets to the
elbow, a crimson spot on her tawny check, innumerable necklaces of glass
beads on her neck; bizarre things, charms, gifts of witch-men, that hung
about her, glittered and trembled at every step. She must have had the
value of several elephant tusks upon her.
She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her
deliberate progress. And in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the
whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the
fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it
had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul.
"She came abreast of the steamer, stood still, and faced us. Her long
shadow fell to the water's edge. Her face had a tragic and fierce aspect
of wild sorrow and of dumb pain mingled with the fear of some struggling,
half-shaped resolve. She stood looking at us without a stir, and like the
wilderness itself, with an air of brooding over an inscrutable purpose. A
whole minute passed, and then she made a step forward. There was a low
jingle, a glint of yellow metal, a sway of fringed draperies, and she
stopped as if her heart had failed her. The young fellow by my side
growled. The pilgrims murmured at my back. She looked at us all as if her
life had depended upon the unswerving steadiness of her glance.
Suddenly
she opened her bared arms and threw them up rigid above her head, as
though in an uncontrollable desire to touch the sky, and at the same time
the swift shadows darted out on the earth, swept around on the river,
gathering the steamer into a shadowy embrace. A formidable silence hung
over the scene.
"She turned away slowly, walked on, following the bank, and passed into
the bushes to the left. Once only her eyes gleamed back at us in the dusk
of the thickets before she disappeared.”
[ Joseph Conrad__ heart of darkness}
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