Sapristi!
Mistah Kurtz,
I presume.1

-------------

1 The first word is a mild imprecation, a corruption of "sacristi"; the second, though it could be read as mimicry of standard southern English, is meant to mark the accent as coming from beyond the pale. The name Kurtz (German for "short") reinforces the salient feature of the narrative. Imprecation, address, deduction: line by line the story goes back in time, and across the equator from west to east, against the course of the sun.
"I presume" refers to the meeting of Stanley and Livingstone in 1871 on the shore of Lake Tanganyika. Livingstone, wandering like a river, was so low on supplies that he would soon have had to borrow from the very slave traders whose activity justified his presence. He was on the wrong side of the watershed, bogged at the source of the Congo, not the Nile. Stanley had been sent by James Gordon Bennett, editor of the New York Herald, to get a story. Though no-one in Britain knew where Livingstone was, the consul at Zanzibar knew how to reach him, so the scoop was something of a sham (most of this information is to be found in David Livingstone and the Victorian Encounter with Africa, ed. J.M. MacKenzie (London, 1996)). It did bolster Stanley's name, though, and started him on a career that took him down the Congo for King Leopold of Belgium, baptizing the font with much African blood. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, published in 1901, recalls a journey he himself had made on the Congo in 1890. The bloody Kurtz and the calculating manager of the ivory business are two sides of Stanley. They meet not at the source of the river, but well downstream, at Stanley Falls. The phrase "Mistah Kurtz" is pronounced on a boat returning to what must have been Leopoldville, now Kinshasa. The boat is next seen heading up the Mekong with Martin Sheen on board, looking to terminate Marlon Brando with extreme prejudice. So far, so good. Sapristi, though the word does occur in Agatha Christie (perhaps as a private joke: the blood of Christie), is much more common in Hergé. Death on the Nile doesn't fit: this is Tintin au Congo (alternative translation: Nothing Doing on the Congo), where Tintin, a foreign correspondent, like Stanley, and indeed like Michael Herr who wrote the screenplay of Apocalypse Now (see above), is there for a story. Tintin is Belgian, though he doesn't boast about it. As a journalist he hits the Dark Continent well after the missionaries and just ahead of the diamond smugglers. He declines big money from American, British and Portuguese agencies - he may be in cahoots with the French - and takes over a country that looks like a Kenyan game park, not a Congolese forest, peopled with Robertson's Gollies. His methods are those of Prospero and Mistah Kurtz. Like them he can be defeated by no-one but himself. He's a loose cannon that gets airlifted out to his next assignment before Conrad's cycles of desire, temptation and surrender can so much as skew his quiff.
Where are the women? All I recall in Tintin is an exceptionally glaikit looking mamma on a train; not a speaking part. The comic is the land of the grunt (see Michael Herr again, his book Dispatches on the Vietnam war). The mysterious stranger is geography, even in the other Rambo, "je est un autre"(the other one-liner of 1871). Mistah Kurtz? It's the same for him. There only are two women: his intended back in Brussels and the African queen - again not a speaking part, more a figurehead. The narrator says, "Girl! What? Did I mention a girl? Oh, she is out of it - completely. They - the women I mean - are out of it - should be out of it. We must help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own, lest ours gets worse."
I presume the moral is clear: Livingstone was living in a cartoon strip. A funny hat instead of a Tintin quiff, but similar tuppence-coloured pictures of him being attacked by a lion, and folksy photos of his attendants in pantomime African dress. Meanwhile Livingstone's wife, too often pregnant, explored the rooming houses of London. Hers should have been a non-speaking role too, but she joined him on his penultimate trip, and she drank and she drank and she told him she didn't believe anymore in any of the religion he had been pushing in Africa, then she died on him.

That appeared to be that: another piece of fiction explained away, an open-and-shut case, till what did I see on the front page on 4 December 1996? "Terrorist Bomb on Paris Train Kills 2". Yes yes, that too, but this: "International Herald Tribune - Frozen Water Found on the Moon".
"Pentagon scientists, speaking at a news conference, said that radar soundings by the Clementine, an unmanned spacecraft, had confirmed the existence of a large mass of ice in an area of permanent shadow near the lunar south pole..
"The southern crater, known as the South Pole-Aitken basin, is 12 kilometres (more than 7 miles) deep, which makes it the deepest yet discovered in the solar system. The lake is estimated to be tens of feet deep."
The Times, 4 December 1996: "...material at the bottom of a crater nearly 8 miles deep is frozen water. The guess is that the water was carried there by a comet which crashed into the moon 3.6 billion years ago, creating the South Pole-Aitken crater... The ice lake is estimated to be 25 feet deep and 200 yards wide."
The source is an article in Science (Vol 274, 29 November 1996, 1495-8). It begins: "The possibility of ice on the moon was suggested in 1961." In fact, it was suggested 7 years earlier, in On a marché sur la lune (Hergé, Les aventures de Tintin, Paris/Tournai, 1954), where Tintin and Captain Haddock find some in a cave.
But earlier in that book Tintin as he leaves the rocket describes "...a nightmare landscape, a landscape of death, of terrifying desolation... Not a single tree or flower or blade of grass..." Dante likens the scene to the River Adige as it passes through Trento, though he saw not a comet but Satan crashed into the middle of it, for geographically the Inferno looks like nothing so much as this crater on the moon with a frozen pond at the bottom. In Dante, though, the moon is a nebula, outermost suburb of paradise.

But why am I telling you all this? And which of you is Mistah Kurtz? Is Conrad's heart of darkness on the Congo or on the Thames? T.S. Eliot thought he knew when he wrote "The Hollow Men": "We are the hollow men ... Headpieces filled with straw..."
"It seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe." That was Conrad's narrator on an employee of the ivory export company. Of the company manager, Conrad's narrator says, "It seemed to me I had never breathed an atmosphere so vile, and I turned mentally to Kurtz for relief - positively for relief... it was something to have at least a choice of nightmares". Eliot, I guess, was afraid of being like them; his fear was proof he wasn't. (Later, when he found the Church, he lost that fear.) When Tintin did London (The Wasteland, Faber & Faber, 1922), the ace reporter dedicated his text to Captain Haddock "il miglior fabbro", thus likening the dedicatee to Arnault Daniel and himself to Dante. Quite a double act. There they were up country, like Romans in darkest Britain at the start of Conrad's story. It's nice to get on with the natives, but if that's too much trouble, you make a wasteland and you call it peace. You know, shantih, shantih, shantih, the peace that passeth understanding unless you read the footnotes.

"It was morning and Belacqua was stuck in the first of the canti in the moon. He was so bogged that he could move neither backward nor forward. Blissful Beatrice was there, Dante also, and she explained the spots on the moon to him. She showed him in the first place where he was at fault, then she put up her own explanation. She had it from God, therefore he could rely on its being accurate in every particular. All he had to do was to follow her step by step. Part one, the refutation, was plain sailing. She made her point clearly, she said what she had to say without fuss or loss of time. But part two, the demonstration, was so dense that Belacqua could not make head or tail of it. The disproof, the reproof, that was patent. But then came the proof, a rapid shorthand of the real facts. A bistatic radar experiment measured the magnitude and polarization of the radar echo versus bistatic angle B, for selected lunar areas. Observations of the lunar south pole yield a same-sense polarization enhancement around B=0. Analysis shows that the observed enhancement is localized to the permanently shadowed regions of the lunar south pole. Radar observations of periodically solar-illuminated lunar surfaces, including the north pole, yielded no such enhancement. A probable explanation for these differences is the presence of low-loss volume scatterers, such as water ice, in the permanently shadowed region at the south pole. Belacqua was bogged indeed. Bored also, impatient to get on to Piccarda. Still he pored over the enigma, he would not concede himself conquered, he would understand at least the meanings of the words, the order in which they were spoken and the nature of the satisfaction that they conferred on the misinformed poet, so that when they were ended he was refreshed and could raise his heavy head, intending to return thanks and make formal retraction of his old opinion."

I've spiked that first paragraph of Beckett's "Dante and the Lobster" with the abstract of the Science article mentioned above, trusting you can distinguish God from the Pentagon. Piccarda? Piccarda, most beautiful of women, more beautiful than ever. Your father put you in a convent, your suitor removed you. The vows you were obliged to make you were compelled to break. That lost you your place in the front stalls of heaven, though you are happy there in the pale outer reaches as you were in the convent, as you were at home. But the spots on the moon are gabbroid basalt, the rest is granite. You can't float there like sunlight in a raindrop. Mary Livingstone, ugly as an aardvark, uglier still when a miscarriage partly paralysed your face. Your father had given you to a fellow-missionary, who sent you home to squalor. That lost you your faith and drove you to drink. A decadent and a heretic. You're not even a poet. Miranda, there are not so many stories in the end; this is a tale of misappropriation. Nothing I can tell you will prepare you for the day. Heart of Darkness is only The Tempest told by an upstart duke, who arrives just as his brother's act is finally coming apart (the magic does get very rough at times). There's a beautiful Ariel poem where Eliot at first can do no wrong:

"What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands
What water lapping at the bow
And scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through the fog
What images return
O my daughter."

then he lapses into another bloody sermon.
I give the floor to Sebastian Barker and the Long Poem Group Newsletter (No.2, February 1996): "When, after a period of seven years' composition (1935-1942), Eliot finally managed, in the face of the Blitz, to complete Four Quartets, he made what Lyndall Gordon in Eliot's New Life (OUP 1988) called his "Nijinsky leap": "Poised over the turning rim of the wheel (of time), he now made for the hub, the still point (of timelessness)." In making this leap (an inescapable act of courage if the poem were to cohere as a whole), it appears he felt obliged to make a conscious, irrevocable, public commitment to mystical Christianity, albeit tempered and made steadfast by the Presocratic philosophy of Heraclitus. In Eliot's case, it is this core of indubitable sincere belief which helps to hold the disparate parts of the poem together. The successful reception of the poem gives us a transparency of a good part of western consciousness at the time, that is to say in the jaws of totalitarian terror. Further horrors were to come to Eliot's mind: the death camps, the atomic bomb. What kind of Nijinsky leap, we might wonder, must be attempted, following Eliot's example, to reconcile human pain and divine love now?"
Holy smoke.
There's a painting by Henry Raeburn on the cover of Tom Scott's Penguin Book of Scottish Verse, the one my generation grew up with: The Reverend Robert Walker skating on Duddingston Loch. (If you can't see the picture, read the poem by David Kinloch.) Arms folded, one leg stretched out behind him, he has just completed the pirouette that drew the painter's attention to him. That minister has eyes you could skate across. Duddingston Loch is a mirror of oil and canvas. He slices the freeze-dried faces of Dante's traitors bedunk kaschlikk, splitting them like kail and cauliflower. Recongeal. It says the Rev. Robert Walker. But I'm not sure.

Sapristi!
Mistah Kurtz.