Charles Marlow is the protagonist of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness - who visited the Congo Free States and saw the exploitation of the African natives for the acquisition of ivory. As he arrived, one of his pointed remarks of colonialism, as he saw how the Company's outpost was in a horrendous state, was how the greed of colonialism was like: "the labby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly.”
In "The Masque of the Red Death" by Edgar Allen Poe, Prince Prospero orders the gates of the abbey to be welded shut in order to protect himself and his inhabitants from the epidemic known as the "Red Death
