in after days to the island. Then I recalled that in my penless and
paperless plight I was as far from the possibility of writing as from
the power to ring for a taxicab and drive home.

Yet the idea of a diary fascinated me. I wished to write in frankness
what it felt like to die at the foot of an undiscovered volcano. There
came to my mind an example I wished to emulate. I had come upon a report
made public by the Naval Department of Japan in which was quoted a
letter written by Lieutenant Sakuma, from the bottom of Hiroshima Bay,
where his submarine had struck and failed to rise again.

Most of his crew lay dead in the sunken vessel, and he himself was
slowly and painfully succumbing to strangulation. He devoted to a note
of apology addressed to his Emperor those hours spent in dying, and
expressed the hope that his message might, in future, be of value in the
avoidance of similar fatalities. He praised the gallantry of his
subordinates.

The letter, read in the Mikado's palace a week later, when the submarine
had been raised with its dead, was in the stoic style of the race and
severely official. It culminated in a broken sentence.

"It is now 12:30 P. M. My breathing is so difficult and painful--I
thought I could blow out gasoline but I am intoxicated with it--Captain
Nakano--it is now 12:40 P. M.--I----"

There it ended. It seemed to me that if I could busy myself in faint
duplicate, with so human a record of approaching the ferry, I could be
in a measure consoled. Then gazing at the Southern Cross, before sleep
brought respite, I found myself thinking once more of the elusive lady
who had so often escaped my inquisitive glance and whose face I should
now never see.

CHAPTER VIII

NATURE INDULGES IN SATIRE

Though I am not giving authorship to this narrative with a view to its
general perusal, I am determined so to write it that if other eyes do
chance upon it they may read the true records of a man's emotions under
those circumstances.

I shall never be able to coax myself into any illusion of heroism in my
adventures and I shall set down my most abject terrors in equal and
impartial degree with the few occasions in which the instinct of
self-preservation enabled me to rise to the need and bluff
magnificently.

The case of the submarine commander of Nippon was different. He wished
to leave behind him such a message as an Emperor might read, and with
exalted devotion to his object, he left it