.. Speke, Burton, Stanley
... my real comrades!... my real world! Rather a world of books than a
world of actuality!...
I was so glad to be among my books again that for a month I gave no
thought to the future. I did nothing but read and study ... except at
those times when I was talking to people prodigiously of my trip and
what I had seen and been through. And naturally and deftly I wove huge
strips of imagination and sheer invention into the woof of every tale or
anecdote....
I captained ships, saw Chinese slaughtered by the thousands, fought
bandits on the outskirts of Manila, helped loot the palace of the
empress in the Sacred City at Pekin ... tales of peril and adventure
that I had heard others relate at camp-fires, in jail, in the
forecastle, on the transport, I unhesitatingly appropriated as my own
experiences.
All the papers printed stories about me. And I was proud about it. And I
became prouder still when I sold a story in two parts to a New York
Sunday paper ... I liked the notoriety....
But as usual, the yarns I retailed struck in upon my own imagination,
too ... just as had my earlier stories of killing Indians. Particularly
the tale I had related of having seen dead Chinamen in heaps with their
heads lopped off. A nightmare of this imaginary episode began to come to
me. And another dream I had--of a huge Boxer, with a cutlass, standing
over me.
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