Many years later, as I faced the firing-squad, I would remember the words of my persecutor on that distant dark and dreadful night that would lead me down a ferocious road of decadence, crime, depravity and danger.

Someone must have slandered me, because one morning I was suddenly apprehended and put in irons in a small and dark dungeon just outside my hometown. It was a bright cold day in March, and the clocks were striking seven. I was thrown into a cell where a man waited behind a desk, his face obscured by darkness.

'You can call me Ishmael', the man said.

'Why am I here I stammered, I have done nothing wrong'.

It was a wrong number that had started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone I was not.
For a long time, I had taken the custom of going to bed early. Thereby I had been sound asleep when the phone had rung. I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. I had not thought it would ever have anything to do with me.

'I am innocent' I said, 'there is no justice in dragging me here'.

'Justice?—You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law' the man behind the desk said. Outside it had been a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets, rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

Weeks later, the snow in the mountains was melting and I had not been given a decent meal for several weeks before I came to understand the gravity of my situation. I had been taken to a different room that morning, in the great green room, there was a telephone and a red carpet and a picture of a man jumping over the moon. You won't be able to escape to the legion this time young man' the very same man who had greeted me the first time I came to this prison had said. I understood that I was to be sent away.

A story like this has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. Anyway, I was sent to Australia, this nation of exiles, for sins I do not care to remember. And I would not like to bore you with them either.

I could hear the firing squad approaching, I closed my eyes and was carried away in my mind to where it had all begun, many years before; in my head, the cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs of my memory revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. Myself being somewhere in there. I remember having thought that I had never begun a year with more misgiving. Little would I know about what was about to happen.