That Blackness of Darkness

This excerpt, describing the ship during the late-night try works session, is one of the most compelling dark things I've ever read.

As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilised laughter forked upwards out of them like the flame from the furnace, as to and fro, in their front, the harpooners wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat around her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul.

See also Conrad, Heart of Darkness:

He lived then before me; he lived as much as he had ever lived -- a shadow insatiable of splendid appearances, of frightful realities; a shadow darker than the shadow of the night, and draped nobly in the folds of a gorgeous eloquence. The vision seemed to enter the house with me -- the stretcher, the phantom-bearers, the wild crowd of obedient worshippers, the gloom of the forests, the glitter of the reach between the murky bends, the beat of the drum, regular and muffled like the beating of a heart -- the heart of a conquering darkness.