A Russian in a harlequin's suit of patches met us at the landing and talked of Kurtz without stopping. The man had enlarged his mind, he said; he had made him see things. Through my glasses I studied the decayed house and then the row of posts before it, and what I took for ornamental balls were heads on stakes, shrunken, dried, with closed eyelids, turned inward toward the house. Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts, the Russian explained. He had made war on the country, and the tribes adored him. The original Kurtz had been educated partly in England, and all Europe had contributed to his making. His mother was half English, his father half French. He had written a report for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs, seventeen pages of splendid eloquence, and at the foot of the last page he had scrawled, "Exterminate all the brutes!"