📖 A relaxing read aloud audiobook excerpt — ideal for unwinding, walking, studying, or resting.

🎧 Audiobook Excerpt from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Read by Chapter Breaks – Short Literary Escapes. Classic audio pills for your commute, bedtime unwind, or a break anytime. At Chapter Breaks, we carefully select and curate iconic passages from classic novels — timeless opening chapters, dramatic turning points, or unforgettable finales. Each episode is around 20–30 minutes, designed to let you dip into great literature without the commitment of a full audiobook. Joseph Conrad – Heart of Darkness – Beginning of Part II | The Eldorado Expedition & The River Toward Kurtz. Whispers in the dark. A name spoken with fear, envy, and awe. A journey upriver toward a man who has become more myth than flesh. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a haunting meditation on empire, obsession, and the shadowed corners of the human soul. Through Marlow’s journey deep into the Congo, Conrad exposes the illusions of civilisation and the corrosive power of ambition. It is a novel of echoes and silences — a descent into wilderness, madness, and the truths that lie beneath the surface of the modern world. In this episode, Marlow overhears a secretive conversation on the riverbank — the manager and his uncle plotting in the dusk, speaking of Kurtz with equal parts dread and resentment. What follows is one of the most atmospheric passages in the novel: the long, suffocating voyage up the Congo River toward Kurtz’s remote station. Through fog, oppressive stillness, and eerie cries rising from the forest, Marlow guides his failing steamer deeper into the “prehistoric earth,” where the wilderness watches with a vengeful, inscrutable patience. We are about to travel with him into that oppressive silence — toward the man at the centre of it all, and into the dark heart of the river. Let's open the page together, your chapter break begins now. If you enjoy classic literature, quiet storytelling, and immersive audiobook excerpts, listen, follow and share to help us bring more classics to life!

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