मेरा आजीवन कारावास / माझी जन्मठेप (स्वातंत्र्यवीर सावरकर - काले पानी का ऐतिहासिक संस्मरण)

CHAPTER XIV
Dear Reader
The story is told. The curtain is rung down on it. Two life-sentences have been
run. And I have brought together my recollections of them within the cover of this book.
They are narrated in brief outline to you; they are put together within the narrowest
compass.
When I came into this world, God sent me in it on* a sort of life-sentence. It was
the span of life allotted to me by Time to stay in this "prison-house of life." This story is
but a chapter of that book of life—a longer story not yet ended. As I completed this
chapter as a dedication to my great worship of the ideal, so the book of life may end as a
dedication to it without break or faltering.
Yes, I am free. The iron fetters on my feet are broken. But the chain of longing
that binds my heart still remains. I have come out of the stone-walls which had buried
me. But my soul is still imprisoned for my vision is not yet reached. The horizon that
limits it is not yet crossed. It engirdles my soul and stifles it.
Dear Reader, Surely you must have been wearied to hear my story, and put out by
the endless repetitions in contains. But I am as much tired in writing, as you may begin
reading it, this weary tale of my life. It has been a long and weary way for me also. How
I, have suffered and how much fatigue of the mind I have passed through in putting it on
paper! But I shall be more than paid for it, if you feel the same disgust for it that I have
felt. For you can finish reading it in a day, while I had to live it for fourteen long years of
transportation. And if the story is so tiresome, unendurable and disgusting to you, how
much must be the living of it to me! Every moment of those fourteen years in that jail has
been an agony of the soul and the body to me, and to my fellow-convicts in that jail. It
was not only fatiguing, unbearable and futile to us all. It was equally or more
excruciating as well, to them and to me. And it is only that you may know it, and feel the
fatigue, the disgust and the pain of it, as we have felt it, that I have chosen to write it for
you. I hope you will have through it some idea of what we have passed through, what we
have endured.
Dear Reader, I lay down my pen and take leave of you. My broken pen I cannot
put aside, however, without telling you never to forget those who stuck to their task,
disheartening and trying though it was; who embraced it to the last; who were nearly
burnt up in that fiery ordeal; and who came out of it because nothing could burn them up
completely in it, Lest you forget! Dear Reader, I say it to you as my last word, do not