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Dark Continent (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)

In the opening scene of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), the unnamed narrator, who introduces the tale, reflects as he looks from the deck of a ship at the Thames River outside London that for centuries the river had borne “all the men of whom the nation is proud,” warriors and explorers who

had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land. . . . What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! . . . The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs...

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