En un momento volvió a emerger de un salto, se apoderó de ambas manos mías, las sacudió sin parar mientras parloteaba:
«Hermano marino... honor... placer... deleite... presentarme... ruso... hijo de un arcipreste... Gobierno de Tambov... ¿Qué? ¡Tabaco! ¡Tabaco inglés; el excelente tabaco inglés! Vaya, eso sí que es de hermanos. ¿Fumar? ¿Dónde hay un marino que no fume?».
“The pipe soothed him, and gradually I made out he had run away from school, had gone to sea in a Russian ship; ran away again; served some time in English ships; was now reconciled with the archpriest. He made a point of that. > ‘But when one is young one must see things, gather experience, ideas; enlarge the mind.’ ‘Here!’ I interrupted. ‘You can never tell! Here I met Mr. Kurtz,’ he said, youthfully solemn and reproachful. I held my tongue after that. It appears he had persuaded a Dutch trading-house on the coast to fit him out with stores and goods, and had started for the interior with a light heart and no more idea of what would happen to him than a baby. He had been wandering about that river for nearly two years alone, cut off from everybody and everything. * ‘I am not so young as I look. I am twenty-five,’ he said. * ‘At first old Van Shuyten would tell me to go to the devil,’ he narrated with keen enjoyment; ‘but I stuck to him,