'The horror! The horror!' Seaman Charlie Marlowe takes a decaying steamboat on a perilous voyage to the heart of Africa. His mission is to relieve an ivory agent named Kurtz, taken sick at his remote trading station on the river Congo. The atrocities that Marlowe witnesses on his journey, and his eventual meeting with the legendary Kurtz, force him to question not only his own human nature and values, but the very basis of European civilization. With personal experience of Africa, and reflecting the savage dealings carried out in the Belgian Congo, Conrad wrote this indictment of the evils of imperialism in 1899.