Of
Hans Holzhaider
The leprosy station was a little way outside of the village. “We sit on a rough wooden bench in the sparse shade of a derelict, stinking hut. All around us are the lepers, with their open wounds, eaten noses, mutilated hands and feet. As so often, we listen to Arturo Teao, the eldest among the lepers. Before more than twenty years he came hither, as a young man, and his only companions were some old leprous men.In this most isolated place on the most isolated island in the Pacific they had nothing to shorten the hours of their dull existence but the awakened ones to pass on to wise youths what their fathers and grandfathers had handed down to them of ancient times. And when the ancients died, Arturo Teao remained the sole keeper of this knowledge.”