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Next after this triumph, Karain is the greatest. It is mysterious, a thing that haunts one by its extreme fascination; and in this, as in all Conrad, there is the trial of life: first the trial, then the failure, finally (but not quite always) the redemption. "As to Karain, nothing could happen to him unless what happens to all—failure and death; but his quality was to appear clothed in the illusion of unavoidable success." And on what a gorgeous and barbaric and changing stage is this obscure tragedy of the soul enacted! There is in it grave splendor. In Conrad's imagination three villages on a narrow plain become a great empire and their ruler a monarch.

To read Conrad is to shudder on the edge of a gulf, in a silent darkness. Karain is full of mystery, Heart of Darkness of an unholy magic. "The fascination of the abomination—you know," the teller of the story says for him, and "droll thing life is." The whole narrative is an evocation of that "stillness of an implacable brooding over an incalculable intention," and of the monstrous Kurtz who has been bewitched by the "heavy mute spell of the wilderness that seems to draw him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of gratified and monstrous passions; and this alone had beguiled his unlawful soul beyond the bounds of permitted aspiration." And it all ends with the cry: "The horror! The horror!" called out in his last despair by a dying man. Gloomy, tremendous, this has a deeper, because more inexplicable, agony than the tragedy of Karain. Here, the darkness is unbroken; there is no remedy; body and soul are drawn slowly and inevitably down under the yielding and pestilent swamp. The failure seems irretrievable. We see nature casting out one who had gone beyond nature. We see "the meanness, the torment, the tempestuous anguish of a soul" that, in its last moment of earthly existence, had peeped over the edge of the gulf, with a stare "that could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to embrace the whole universe."