Heart of Darkness: Large Print

The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was atrest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, theonly thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide.The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminablewaterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in theluminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand stillin red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested onthe low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless overthe biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.The Director of Companies was our captain and our host. We four affectionately watchedhis back as he stood in the bows looking to seaward. On the whole river there was nothingthat looked half so nautical. He resembled a pilot, which to a seaman is trustworthinesspersonified. It was difficult to realize his work was not out there in the luminous estuary, but behind him, within the brooding gloo