Possibly I am a
hundred, possibly more; but I cannot tell because I have never aged
as other men, nor do I remember any childhood. So far as I can
recollect I have always been a man, a man of about thirty. I appear
today as I did forty years and more ago, and yet I feel that I
cannot go on living forever; that some day I shall die the real
death from which there is no resurrection. I do not know why I
should fear death, I who have died twice and am still alive; but yet
I have the same horror of it as you who have never died, and it is
because of this terror of death, I believe, that I am so convinced
of my mortality.
And because of this conviction I have determined to write down the
story of the interesting periods of my life and of my death. I
cannot explain the phenomena; I can only set down here in the words
of an ordinary soldier of fortune a chronicle of the strange events
that befell me during the ten years that my dead body lay
undiscovered in an Arizona cave.
I have never told this story, nor shall mortal man see this
manuscript until after I have passed over for eternity. I know that
the average human mind will not believe what it cannot grasp, and so
I do not purpose being pilloried by the public, the pulpit, and the
press, and held up as a colossal liar when I am but telling the
simple truths which some day science will substantiate.
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