I have no pleasures. Yes, one: work. Physical and mental, but preferably physical. I like to exhaust myself, sweat, hear my bones crack. Half my money I throw away, waste it however and wherever I feel inclined. I'm not a slave to money: money is my slave. I am a slave to work, and I'm proud of it. I fell trees; I have a contract with the British. I make rope; and now I've started planting cotton, too. Last night, among my negroes, two tribes-the Wa'yao and the Wa'ngoni-began fighting over a woman-over a whore. Just hurt pride, you know. Just the same as in Greece. Insults, brawls, and then out come the clubs. They broke one another's heads over her. The women ran to fetch me in the middle of the night, and woke me with their yapping, to go and arbitrate. I was angry, told them all to go to the devil, then to the British police. But they stayed there howling in front of my door the whole night. At dawn I went out and arbitrated.

Tomorrow, early, I am going to scale the Usumbara mountains, with their dense forest, fresh waters and everlasting greenness. Well, you lousy Babylonian Greek, when will you cut adrift from Europe? "… that great whore that sitteth upon many waters, with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication…!" When will you come, so that we can climb these pure and wild mountains together?

I have a child by a black woman: a girl. I've sent her mother away: she cuckolded me in public in the full glare of the midday sun, under every green tree in the neighborhood. I had enough of her, and threw her out. But I kept the girl; she's two. She can walk, and she's beginning to talk. I'm teaching her Greek; the first sentence I taught her was: "I spit on you, you lousy Greeks, I spit on you, you lousy Greeks!"

She looks like me, the little scamp; she's only got her mother's broad, flat nose. I love her, but just as you love a dog or a cat. Come out here and get a boy by a Usumbara woman. We'll marry the two of them one day, just to amuse ourselves, and to amuse them, too!

Goodbye! May the devil go with you, and with me, dear friend!

Karayannis, Servus diabolicus Dei.

I left the letter open on my knees. An ardent desire to go took possession of me once more. Not because I wanted to leave-I was quite all right on this Cretan coast, and I felt happy and free here and I needed nothing-but because I have always been consumed with one desire: to touch and see as much as possible of the earth and the sea before I die.

I stood up, changed my mind, and instead of climbing the hill went hurriedly towards the beach. I felt the other letter in the upper pocket of my coat, and could not wait any more. That sweet, unbearable foretaste of joy had lasted long enough.

I reached the hut, lit the fire, made some tea, ate some bread and honey and oranges. I undressed, stretched out on my bed and opened the letter:

Master and neophyte-Greetings!

I have a tremendous and difficult job here, thank "God"-I enclose the dangerous word in inverted commas (like a wild beast behind bars) so that you do not get excited as soon as you open my letter. Well, a very difficult job, "God" be praised! Half a million Greeks are in danger in the south of Russia and the Caucasus. Many of them speak only Turkish or Russian, but their hearts speak Greek fanatically. They are of our race. Just to look at them-the way their eyes flash, rapacious, ferrety, the cunning and sensuality of their lips when they smile, the way they have managed to become bosses and have moujiks working for them in this immense territory of Russia-it's quite enough to convince you that they are descendants of your beloved Odysseus. So one comes to love them and cannot let them perish.

For they are in danger of perishing. They have lost all they had, are hungry and naked. From one side they are harried by the Bolsheviks; from the other by the Kurds. Refugees have swarmed in from every direction to settle in one town or another in Georgia and Armenia. There's no food, medicine, or clothing. They gather in the ports, scan the horizon anxiously for Greek ships coming to take them back to their Mother- Greece. One part of our race-that means one part of our soul-is panic-stricken.

If we leave them to their fate, they will perish. We need a lot of love and understanding, enthusiasm and practical sense-those qualities which you like so much to see united-if we are going to save them and get them back to the part of our own free land where they will be of most use-that is, on the frontiers of Macedonia, and, further afield, on the frontiers of Thrace. That is the only way we shall save hundreds of thousands of Greeks, and save ourselves with them. For as soon as I arrived here I drew a circle, in the way you taught me, and called that circle "my duty." I said: "If I save this entire circle, I am saved; if I do not save it, I am lost!" Well, inside that circle there are five hundred thousand Greeks!

I go to towns and villages, collect all the Greeks together, write reports, send telegrams, try to make our officials in Athens send boats, food, clothes, and medicine, and transport these poor creatures to Greece. If to struggle with zeal and obstinacy is to be happy, then I am happy. I do not know whether I have cut my happiness to my stature, to use your phrase. Please heaven I have, because then I would be a great person. I would like to increase my stature to what I think would make me happy; that is, to the farthest frontiers of Greece! But that's enough theory! You are lying on your Cretan beach, listening to the sound of the sea and the santuri-you have time, I have not. I am swallowed up by activity and I am glad of it. Action, dear inactive master, action; there is no other salvation.

The subject of my meditations is, in fact, very simple and all of a piece. I say: These inhabitants of the Pontus and the Caucasus, peasants of Kars, big and small merchants of Tiflis, Batum, Novo Rossisk, Rostov, Odessa and the Crimea, are ours, they are of our blood; for them, as for us, the capital of Greece is Constantinople. We all have the same chief. You call him Odysseus, others Constantinos Palaeologos [17]-not the one who was killed beneath the walls of Byzantium, but the other, the legendary one, who was changed into marble and still stands erect waiting for the Angel of Liberty. With your permission, I call this chief of our race Acritas. [18] I like that name better; it is more austere and warlike. As soon as you hear it, there rises within you the image of the eternal Hellene, fully armed, fighting without cease or respite on the boundaries and frontiers. On every frontier: national, intellectual, and spiritual. And if you add Digenes,[18] you describe even more completely that marvellous synthesis of East and West which is our race.

I am in Kars now; I came to assemble all the Greeks of the neighboring villages. On the day of my arrival the Kurds had seized a Greek teacher and priest in the district and nailed horse-shoes to their feet. The notables were horrified and took refuge in the house where I am staying. We can hear the Kurds' guns coming closer all the time. All these Greeks have their eyes fixed on me, as if I were the only one with the strength to save them.

I was counting on leaving tomorrow for Tiflis, but now, in the face of this danger, I am ashamed to leave. So I am staying. I don't say I am not afraid; I am aFraid, but I'm ashamed. Wouldn't Rembrandt's Warrior, my Warrior, have done the same thing? He would have stayed; so I am staying, too. If the Kurds come into the town it is only natural and just that I should be the first to be shoed. I am sure, master, you never thought your pupil would end like this!