r age possesses.

JOHN GALSWORTHY

September 1915 Manaton: Devon

GREEN MANSIONS

PROLOGUE

It is a cause of very great regret to me that this task has taken so
much longer a time than I had expected for its completion. It is
now many months--over a year, in fact--since I wrote to Georgetown
announcing my intention of publishing, IN A VERY FEW MONTHS, the whole
truth about Mr. Abel. Hardly less could have been looked for from his
nearest friend, and I had hoped that the discussion in the newspapers
would have ceased, at all events, until the appearance of the promised
book. It has not been so; and at this distance from Guiana I was not
aware of how much conjectural matter was being printed week by week in
the local press, some of which must have been painful reading to Mr.
Abel's friends. A darkened chamber, the existence of which had never
been suspected in that familiar house in Main Street, furnished
only with an ebony stand on which stood a cinerary urn, its surface
ornamented with flower and leaf and thorn, and winding through it all
the figure of a serpent; an inscription, too, of seven short words which
no one could understand or rightly interpret; and finally the disposal
of the mysterious ashes--that was all there was relating to an untold
chapter in a man's life for imagination to work on. Let us hope that
now, at last, the romance-weaving will come to an end. It was, however,
but natural that the keenest curiosity should have been excited; not
only because of that peculiar and indescribable charm of the man, which
all recognized and which won all hearts, but also because of that hidden
chapter--that sojourn in the desert, about which he preserved silence.
It was felt in a vague way by his intimates that he had met with unusual
experiences which had profoundly affected him and changed the course of
his life. To me alone was the truth known, and I must now tell, briefly
as possible, how my great friendship and close intimacy with him came
about.

When, in 1887, I arrived in Georgetown to take up an appointment in a
public office, I found Mr. Abel an old resident there, a man of means
and a favourite in society. Yet he was an alien, a Venezuelan, one
of that turbulent people on our border whom the colonists have always
looked on as their natural enemies. The story told to me was that about
twelve years before that time he had arrived at Georgetown from some
remote district in the interior; th