The Lagoon" is a short story by Joseph Conrad composed in 1896 and first
published in Cornhill Magazine in 1897. The story is about a white man,
referred to as "Tuan" (the equivalent of "Lord" or "Sir"), who is
travelling through an Indonesian rainforest and is forced to stop for
the night with a distant Malay friend named Arsat. Upon arriving, he
finds Arsat distraught, for his lover is dying. Arsat tells the distant
and rather silent white man a story of his past.