On the whole river there was nothing that looked half so nautical. We four affectionately watched his back as he stood in the bows looking to seaward. The Director of Companies was our captain and our host. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide.
The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) 90 Heart of Darkness: Chapter 1
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