Heart of Darkness opens with an image of stillness: The Nellie is anchored, the sails are stationary, and the crew mirrors the ship’s immobility as they rest at ease on the deck. Barges are ‘drifting up with the tide’, but despite this ostensible movement, the narrator remarks that the ‘tanned sails … stand still’ –unsurprising given that the air, ‘condensed into a mournful gloom’, is ‘brooding motionless’ over the city of London. Caught in this stillness, the narrator remarks, the only option is to wait for the tide to turn.

Heart of Darkness thus begins by evoking waiting, and this waiting is the impetus for Marlow’s tale, which comprises the rest of the text. The framing narrator explicitly makes the connection between storytelling and waiting. After Marlow remarks, ‘“The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much”’, the narrator observes, ‘We looked on, waiting patiently –there was nothing else to do till the end of the flood.’ The period of waiting is a time of forced contemplation for Marlow and his listeners as Marlow’s recollections oblige them to look into the darkness of colonial conquest and exploitation. The waiting begins while ‘[t]he day was ending in a serenity of still and exquisite brilliance’, at twilight –a time of day that will becoming increasingly important over the course of this chapter. During the wait, as light and dark intermingle into an inseparable gloom, Marlow reflects on the ‘very old times, when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago –the other day’, strikingly evoking a paradoxically elongated and compressed sense of time. The suspension of day and night, mirroring the suspension of the tide and the suspension of time during their waiting, prompts Marlow to reflect that with a long view of time and history, it seems as though the ‘darkness was here yesterday’.