The Lagoon

The Lagoon" is a short story by Joseph Conrad composed in 1896 and first published in Cornhill Magazine in 1897.

The story is about a white man, referred to as "Tuan" (the equivalent of "Lord" or "Sir"), who is travelling through an Indonesian rainforest and is forced to stop for the night with a distant Malay friend named Arsat.

Upon arriving, he finds Arsat distraught, for his lover is dying.

Arsat tells the distant and rather silent white man a story of his past.