<P> However, over the course of his stay in Africa, Kurtz becomes corrupted . He takes his pamphlet and scribbles in, at the very end, the words "Exterminate all the brutes!" He induces the natives to worship him, setting up rituals and venerations worthy of a tyrant . By the time Marlow, the protagonist, sees Kurtz, he is ill with jungle fever and almost dead . Marlow seizes Kurtz and endeavors to take him back down the river in his steamboat . Kurtz dies on the boat with the last words, "The horror! The horror!" Kurtz ultimately was changed by the jungle . At first he wanted to bring civilization to the natives, as his painting shows, but in the end he changed to wanting to "exterminate all the brutes!" </P> <P> Kurtz's persona is generally understood to derive from the notoriously brutal history of the so - called "Congo Free State", which was later taken over by Belgium and became a Belgian colony in 1908 . In his history book King Leopold's Ghost, Adam Hochschild suggests that Léon Rom, an administrator in King Leopold's Congo, i.e. in the Congo Free State, was the principal inspiration for the Kurtz character, citing references as the heads on the stakes outside of the station and other similarities between the two . Hochschild and other authors have also suggested that the fate of the disastrous "rear column" of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition (1886 - 8) on the Congo may have also been an influence . Column leader Edmund Musgrave Barttelot, "went mad, began hitting, whipping, and killing people, and was finally murdered". Bloom notes that Kurtz's sophisticated brutality is closer to that of Barttelot's associate slave trader Tippu Tip . The expedition's overall leader, Henry Morton Stanley, the principal figure involved in preparing the Congo for Leopold's rule, may also have been an influence . </P> <P> A personal acquaintance of Conrad's, Georges Antoine Klein, may also have been a real - life basis for the character . Klein was an employee of the Brussels - based trading company Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut - Congo, and died shortly after being picked up on the steamboat Conrad was piloting . Further, "Klein" means "little" in German, and as Marlow muses in the novella, "Kurtz" means "short" in the same language . </P> <P> Conrad also expressed an admiration of Robert Louis Stevenson's Pacific Ocean writings, in particular the stories "The Beach of Falesá" and The Ebb - Tide, as well as the non-fiction account of Tembinok' of the Gilbert Islands that appeared in In the South Seas . All three texts contain megalomaniacs who manipulate their circumstances and remote settings to assert power over others . It is widely believed that Conrad drew influence from these characters, as well as Stevenson's plot lines, when writing Heart of Darkness . </P>

Where is kurtz buried in heart of darkness