Explore "Some Reminiscences" by Joseph Conrad on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
As I have said, I was unpacking my luggage after a journey from London into Ukraine. The MS. of "Almayer's Folly" -- my companion already for some three years or more, and then in the ninth chapter of its age -- was deposited unostentatiously on the writing-table placed between two windows. It didn't occur to me to put it away in the drawer the table was fitted with, but my eye was attracted by the good form of the same drawer's brass handles. Two candelabra with four candles each lighted up festally the room which had waited so many years for the wandering nephew. The blinds were down.
Within five hundred yards of the chair on which I sat stood the first peasant hut of the village -- part of my maternal grandfather's estate, the only part remaining in the possession of a member of the family; and beyond the village in the limitless blackness of a winter's night there lay the great unfenced fields -- not a flat and severe plain, but a kindly bread-giving land of low rounded ridges, all white now, with the black patches of timber nestling in the hollows. The road by which I had come ran through the village with a turn just outside the gates closing the short drive. Somebody was abroad on the deep snowtrack; a quick tinkle of bells stole gradually into the stillness of the room like a tuneful whisper.