ABSTRACT
I watched last week a very interesting film of a journey towards the source of the Orinoco: River of Death in the admirable World About Us series (BBC-2). There was a curious naivety, though, in the frank description of how destructive, physically and socially, the culture-contacts with these remote peoples could be, and then the failure to relate this to the persistence of the journey, with all its physical dangers, and to the really disturbing persistence of the missionaries. In mood and place the film was like Conrad's Heart of Darkness, but with only the questioning, not the answering, consCience.
