Introduction

At dusk a yacht lies at anchor in the mouth of the Thames, waiting for the turn of the tide. The old sailor Marlow tells his friends aboard of something that happened to him when he was young: hired by a Belgian trading company, he went to captain a steamer on a great river in the heart of Africa. Along the way he saw the folly, greed and brutality of the colonisers, and Black labourers in chains dying of hunger. He heard that up the river there was an agent called Kurtz, a man of extraordinary gifts, who sent down more ivory than all the others together. Marlow travels upstream, deeper and deeper into the darkness of the primeval forest, and at last finds the dying Kurtz, only to discover that this man, who came with the ideals of civilisation, has sunk in the jungle into a tyrant worshipped as a god by the natives and ruling by terror. Kurtz's last words are a cry: 'The horror! The horror!' This short novel is a forerunner of modernist literature.