<p><strong>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.</strong></p><p>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.&nbsp;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.</p><p>A seminal novel that had a wide range of influence in the century to follow, <em>Heart of Darknes</em>s explores the disturbing idea that the sanity residing in the human psyche is frightfully close to the edge of madness.</p>