Riallaro: The Archipelago of Exiles

How deep the debt we owe him when we think of all he taught us! Beside it all else sinks into nothingness. And there is no way in which we can vent our gratitude to him but by telling his story to other men as he told it to us. We could have spent all our days as well as all our nights in listening to him. But it was only now and then he fell into the mood of reminiscence. And so great a value did we attach to his every word that after each conversation or monologue we retired into our storehouse cave and wrote it down. We did our best to give his own language and form, but memory is treacherous, and we felt at each attempt that we had marred the beauty or nobleness of his utterances by phrases of our own or by the tinge of our personalities. He followed no sequence of time or circumstance; for he spoke as his own spirit or our themes moved him. But out of our rough jottings we have pieced together the following narrative, most of it our representation at the moment of his speech, some of it from the distant memory of incidental talks with him in the bush, when we were far from paper or pen. It is as close an approach to his very words as our love and reverence have been able to achieve.