A steamer captain named Marlow takes a job hauling ivory up the Congo for a Belgian trading company, and the deeper he pushes into the continent the more the enterprise curdles — into rot, cruelty, and a single obsessive name whispered at every station: Kurtz. What he finds at the end of the river is a brilliant man who went out to civilize and stayed to be worshipped, dying with a verdict on his own soul. Conrad turned a journey upriver into the twentieth century's darkest mirror — the book that named the emptiness at the core of empire, and that everything from Apocalypse Now to the modern political thriller is still rowing toward.