I gave my name, and looked about. Deal table in the middle, plain chairs all around the walls, on one end a large shining map, marked with all the colors of a rainbow. There was a vast amount of red — good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there, a deuce of a lot of blue, a little green, smears of orange, and, on the East Coast, a purple patch, to show where the jolly pioneers of progress drink the jolly lager- beer. However, I wasn’t going into any of these. I was going into the yellow. Dead in the center. And the river was there — fascinating — deadly — like a snake.
—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1899.
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