Heart of Darkness

A steamer captain tells, over a slack tide on the Thames, how he took a ship up a river in Africa to fetch out an agent who had stopped sending ivory and started sending nothing. Conrad had commanded such a steamer on the Congo in 1890 and came back with the fever that dogged him for life. What the company calls trade the book calls plunder, and the man at the end of the river is the company's best man. Fifty-eight plates by Turner, Whistler and others follow the river from sunset to dusk, matching the slow, darkening passage up the Congo.