It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. There were moments when one's past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare to yourself but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants, and water, and silence. The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off forever from everything you had known once -somewhere- far away in another existence perhaps. On silvery sandbanks hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine.

Through his journey, Marlow develops an intense interest in investigating Kurtz, an ivory-procurement agent, and Marlow is shocked upon seeing what the European traders have done to the natives.

The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness retells the story of Marlow's job as an ivory transporter down the Congo. The Narrator describes a night spent on a ship in the mouth of the Thames River in England. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest.

“Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings.

Heart of darkness by joseph conrad