ABSTRACT
In Heart of Darkness, Conrad writes as if the words on the page were only 'surface markers' of some vast secret, and the following pages trace through this enigmatic code of secrecy as it appears in some of these surface markers. Both stillness and vagueness are thus presented in exordium* as preliminary signifiers of the dominant code: 'The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway'. The fictional world we are about to enter is not only very still, it is also vast. The spatial image which bears it is once again that of immensity though here, through the references to Sir Francis Drake, Sir John Franklin and to the Roman invaders, the immensity is also historical. What Conrad gives here, in a vignette, is the perfect expression of the signifier which he has termed enigma.
