Last week, I saw straight into the Heart of Darkness. But I'm not talking about depravity or some form of moral corruption, or in fact anything malign. Stop anyone in the street, and ask them to define this expression, and I'm pretty confident these would be the attributes that nearly everyone would expect to see sheltering under it's gothic eaves. That's the shrink-wrapped description it seems to bound with. Not here, though. I'm looking at an altogether different context.

I was on a late night ferry last week, returning from Gozo, the second largest island in the Maltese archipelago. In front lay Malta, our destination, to one side was Italy, and on the other, further away lay Tunisia and North Africa. It was the darkest night I've ever known. The deepest, blackest night I've been in. Deeper than ebony. No other pigment. Only this immense dark wall. Solid. Dense. Light had simply vanished, sucked away somewhere.

No visible break between the sea and the sky. Not a smudge of luminescence to mark the boundary of air and water. Disorienting, just to look at from the deck of a reasonably large ship as the one I was on; but to be afloat on the same night in something smaller and nowhere near as safe, barely imaginable. I've read plenty of stories about skiers and climbers caught in catastrophic snowfalls - whiteouts - where they can't tell up from down, it's that impenetrable. Terrifying? Yeah, they all agree there. To be on a small, scarcely, if at all, seaworthy boat, as no doubt people were that night, and nights before and since; huddled together, alone, all undoubtably frightened, and for some probably the first time they've even seen the sea, let alone been on it. Then how must that feel?

I'm certain that as I looked out into the mesmerisingly dark immense night there were people in the heart of it clawing their way to a new life. I hope you make it.