Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness opens in a city, London, whose moral contamination is reflected in a language drained of redeeming warmth. A port city, it is a place whose civilities have been traded for greed. It offers itself to the world as a place of distinction whose history is to be celebrated, the site of national endeavour. There is, though, another current flowing, and always has been. There are dark stories to be told of its past, and darker still to be told of its present. The shadow of slavery reaches back into the London fog, cruelties perpetrated in the name of trade. Deeds committed in a distant land leave their residue so that for the narrator of this story, as for the storyteller within it, there is a bleakness that seems to embrace even the natural world. To approach the heart of the city is to see the sun become ‘a dull red without rays and without heat, as if about to go out suddenly, stricken to death by the touch of that gloom brooding over a crowd of men’. The place itself becomes monstrous.