But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself, and, by heavens! I tell you, it had gone mad.

Charles Marlow, at the behest of his employer, an ivory trading company, travels to the heart of Africa with a simple order: seek out an important trading post headed by a man named Kurtz.  On his steamboat down the Congo River, Marlow begins to discover a developing lore surrounding Kurtz, who has reached a near mystical and divine status among the natives, yet feared and intimidating all the same.

A seminal novel that had a wide range of influence in the century to follow, <i>Heart of Darkness</i> explores the disturbing idea that the sanity residing in the human psyche is frightfully close to the edge of madness.