8 1/2"

I am not altogether sure why I feel compelled to provide this account of my sexual adventures across the earth during those last naive years before the Great War put a bloody end to the white man's illusions of superiority.

Perhaps it is because I have learned more in bed than elsewhere and would like to pass on this wisdom... under a pseudonym.

Certainly I learned more about my fellow prisoners in the flesh—through acting out of our sexual fantasies and living through of unbelievably high moments of erotic ecstasy— than I could ever have discovered in proper schoolrooms, self-consciously clever literary salons, or through the gray evidence of book-print.

I now have few illusions about the essential, overpowering carnality of man's appetites. I accept this as the true condition of human affairs but have myself set out on a rapidly widening path of spiritual liberation. (Achieved, ironically enough, through the absolute exhaustion of my own sensuality in one intense year of excruciating practice.)

It is even now hard to believe that the totally innocent young woman who set out from Indianapolis on a sweltering July day in 1906 was me. It is hard to believe that I knew so little of the glittering world beyond our bland prairies.