He did not want to acknowledge it, even to himself. He began to reckon that to smuggle five million five-lire pieces from Italy and the Southern Tyrol through Vorarlberg to Switzerland would require two hundred and fifty people on each frontier. That was five hundred men for the smuggling alone. If he reckoned the buyers and the Bolzano collectors as well, it was really seven hundred. With their families he might consider that he was keeping, roughly, about four thousand people. That was a small township. A little town lay in his grasp, pledged to evil purposes, working in dark nights, stealing along mysterious byways, avoiding the revolvers of Customs officials, working stealthily, steadily, at his will. They had no thought either, but of him, the owner of the money, the employer and dictator, the possessor of all power and force. They ventured their lives for him, but he had never seen one of them. How would it be if he were to see and converse with them, appearing abruptly before them when they were in the midst of their enterprise? They would imagine themselves to be caught, until they should have realized that it was he, their master and employer, who stood amongst them. Four thousand people; it was a whole district. But in Citopomar it would be something very different when he traversed the virgin forests and had the Botocudos and all the other tribes directly under his thumb, and had left this insignificant beggarly little continent behind him! There his word alone would be law. There, in Citopomar, the dream of his boyhood would be fulfilled--a dream which had already begun to be realized on that large and desolate island which lay cradled in the ocean yonder. There he had owned men; there wild Nature was his alone; as a conqueror he had sailed the waters; his blood and sinews governed men; his will was imposed on Nature; the palms of his planting yielded him a luxuriant growth of wealth--sheer gold. He could despise it because he did not need it, for there he was free, free as a king, a deity!... But the war had driven him out of his Paradise and sent him back to the despised continent of Europe. He could not endure life in these European countries. He felt as if he were confined in a pasture, eating grass like dumb, senseless cattle ate their predestined, accustomed grass. No, he could not live thus! Therefore by undermining State organization he was preparing a State for himself, with laws which he alone made, with powers vested in himself over the souls and bodies of men. By means of his accomplices he was collecting the money wherewith to establish his empire in the primeval forests of Brazil, the Empire of Citopomar. He was self-sufficing. What were men to him? He scattered them at will. Yonder, however, in the future, in Citopomar, there would be none who _could_ oppose him.