Joseph Conrad: “The first intimation he had of there being something wrong was a big white boat, adrift, with the dead body of a hairy man inside, bumping against the bows of his steamer. The hairy nondescript creature had a check shirt and blue dungaree trousers. Something dreadful, no doubt. Compassion certainly had no place in them.”

Female guide: “The globe room. The name comes from the large globe on one of the tables.The walls are covered with six thousand books, largely classics. The total number of books in all rooms is thirty three thousand”.

Male guide: “Ìt was Heinrich Thodes´s library, and most of his art books are here. Some people find more in a forest than in a book.”

Joseph Conrad: “He lay awake a long time; and his slumbers, when they came, were unsatisfactory and short. The morning light had no joy for his eyes. He listened dismally to the movements in the house. Another poisened day to get through somehow!
He sat in a chair and mused. On the verandah he fancied he had a glimpse of a vanishing man, though he was not at all sure that he had seen anything. A creature with an antediluvian lower jaw, hairy like a mastodon, and formed like a prehistoric ape, had laid his table.
He would make a ferocious entry in his pocketbook casting off the abiding illusion of his existence.
Then he would hear doors being slammed upstairs; and a profound silence would fall upon the whole house, upon his hotel appropriated, haunted by those insolently outspoken men provided with a whole armoury of weapons in their trunks.
He didn't need to spy one of them sharpening a devilish long knife behind some bushes, while glancing right and left with his wild eyes, to know what was in the wind.
It is not always safe for the helpless to display the delicacy of their sentiments. An insane bandit is a deadly combination.
"You talk mighty big. You talk of ranging all over the world and doing great things, and taking fortune by the scruff of the neck, but here you stick at this miserable business!"
Next thing they did was to attend to the dead man, who was making a great smell frizzling his face on the red coals.
Consummate politeness is not the right tonic for an emotional collapse.”