My failure, during the first five or six years of my art training, to get set in the right direction, and the disappointment which it caused me, drove me the more persistently into writing as an alternative.

I was just then going through a healthy reaction from the orthodoxy of my youth religion had become for me not so much a possession as an obsession, which I was trying to throw off, and this iconoclastic tale of an imaginary tribe was the result.

It is the sincerest thing I have written, caught by the drama of a soul struggling in the contrary toils of love and religion - death brought them into harmony.

Suicide is possible, but not probable hanging, I trust, is even more unlikely for I hope that, by the time I die, my countrymen will have become civilised enough to abolish capital punishment.