The Nellie swung to her anchor in the Thames without a flutter of the sails, and we waited for the turn of the tide. The day was ending in a serenity of still and exquisite brilliance, but a mournful gloom brooded over the greatest town on earth. Marlow sat cross-legged, resembling an idol, and said suddenly, "And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth." He was the only man of us who still followed the sea. He went on to speak of the Romans who came here nineteen hundred years ago, of the commander of a trireme ordered north through the mists, and of the decent young citizen in a toga who landed in a swamp and felt the savagery closing round him. "We live in the flicker," he said, "and what saves us is efficiency, the devotion to efficiency."