Before Marlow speaks, however, Conrad allows the reader to glimpse the narrator's values and assumptions. He first speaks of the Thames as a "venerable stream" that exists to perform "unceasing service" to those who have tamed it: "The old river in its broad reach rested unruffled at the decline of day, after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks." To the narrator, nature exists to serve mankind, especially mankind's commerce and trade. This idea of mankind's dominance over the earth is questioned by Marlow later in the novel, as he looks out at the jungle and asks, "What were we that had strayed in here? Could we handle that dumb thing, or would it handle us? I felt how big, how confoundedly big, was that thing that couldn't talk, and perhaps was deaf as well. What was in there?" Conrad's reason for framing Marlow's narrative thus begins to become apparent: The narrator's values and assumptions are challenged — although indirectly — by Marlow's story, and the reader is meant to perceive these two points-of-view as two different understandings of man's relationship to the natural world and the people in it. Although the narrator states that the Thames leads "to the uttermost ends of the earth," he never imagines that his civilized London could ever have been (as Marlow calls it), "one of the dark places of the earth."
Such a contrast between the narrator and Marlow's attitudes is more readily seen in the way the narrator speaks of what he sees as England's glorious past. According to him, the Thames is a river that has served the nation in efforts of both trade and exploration. The narrator finds glory and pride in his nation's past, assured in his knowledge that "knight-errants" of the sea have brought "sparks from the sacred fire" of civilization to the most remote corners of the earth. While these "knights" may have resorted to the "sword," they have also passed the "torch," and, in doing so, made the world a more prosperous and civilized place. (Recall the painting by Kurtz that Marlow sees at the Central Station.) The narrator knows the men and their ships and speaks of them in a reverential tone. Europe's past is the history of brave adventurers conquering the unknown, and, in the process, transforming "the dreams of men" into "the seeds of commonwealths" and "the germs of empires."
