Plot Summary
This section opens with Marlow describing the boiler-maker, a foreman at the Central Station who is a lank, bald widower with six children and an obsessive passion for pigeon-flying. Marlow has befriended this man and the few other mechanics at the station—workers whom the "pilgrims" (Company agents) look down upon. When Marlow excitedly tells the boiler-maker that rivets are coming to repair the steamboat, the two men erupt into a joyful, almost manic dance on the iron deck, their clattering celebration echoing through the silent jungle and disturbing the station.
However, the promised rivets never arrive. Instead, over three weeks, the Eldorado Exploring Expedition descends upon the station in five installments—each section led by a donkey carrying a white man in new clothes, followed by porters hauling an absurd quantity of equipment and supplies. The expedition is led by the uncle of the station manager, a man who resembles "a butcher in a poor neighbourhood" and who conspires constantly with his nephew. Marlow describes the expedition members as "sordid buccaneers"—reckless, greedy, and cruel, yet lacking genuine courage, foresight, or moral purpose. Their sole aim is to extract treasure from the land, no different from burglars breaking into a safe.
The section closes with Marlow resigning himself to waiting. He gives up worrying about the rivets and begins to think occasionally about Kurtz, the mysterious agent upriver who reportedly came to Africa "equipped with moral ideas" and whom Marlow is curious to meet.
Character Development
The boiler-maker is introduced as a vivid minor character whose quirky humanity—his devotion to his children, his pigeons, and his carefully laundered beard-wrapper—stands in sharp contrast to the hollow pretensions of the Company pilgrims. Marlow himself reveals his alignment with honest laborers over the scheming agents. The manager and his uncle are further established as conspiratorial figures, while Kurtz is planted in Marlow's consciousness as an object of growing curiosity—a man who may represent something different from the moral emptiness around him.
Themes and Motifs
The section powerfully develops the theme of colonial greed through the Eldorado Exploring Expedition, whose very name ironically invokes the mythical city of gold that never existed. The motif of work versus idleness recurs as genuine laborers (the boiler-maker, Marlow) are contrasted with parasitic exploiters. The overwhelming jungle remains a brooding presence—described as "a rioting invasion of soundless life" ready to "sweep every little man of us out of his little existence"—reinforcing humanity's insignificance against nature.
Literary Devices
employs irony in naming the expedition after Eldorado, a place synonymous with futile greed. The celebrated passage describing the jungle vegetation as "a rolling wave of plants, piled up, crested, ready to topple" is a masterful example of personification and imagery, rendering the natural world as a living, threatening force. The juxtaposition of the joyful rivet-dance with the arrival of the expedition creates a structural contrast between hope and disappointment, honest labor and corrupt enterprise. The mention of an "ichthyosaurus" bathing in the river introduces a prehistoric allusion that deepens the sense of Africa as a primordial, timeless landscape.