While considering these thoughts in my mind, I felt very well that I, by carrying them out, would put myself in a danger which was not to be taken lightly. What if this fictional self would not be understood and the meaning of this "first person narrator" would not be comprehended? What if they would believe that I was referring to myself? Was is not obvious that everybody who lacked the intelligence or good will to distinguish between fiction and reality, would call me a liar and a swindler? Yes, this was indeed possible, but I did not regard it as probable. After all, I had to equip this "first person narrator", this Kara Ben Nemsi or Old Shatterhand, with all of the good attributes which mankind had achieved up until this day in the course of its development. My hero had to possess the highest intelligence, the deepest heart, and the greatest skillfulness in all physical exercises. Did it not go entirely without saying that in reality, this could never all be found in a single human being! And if I, as I intended to do, would write a series of thirty to forty volumes, it could certainly be presumed, that no reasonable man would get the idea, that a single person could have experienced all this. No! The accusation that I was a liar and a swindler was, at least for people who think, entirely impossible! This was how I thought then. Yes, I was even firmly convinced that, though I did not describe myself in this "first person narrator", I could nevertheless maintain with a clear conscience that I had experienced or witnessed the contents of these narrations myself, because they were taken from my own life or at least from my closest environment. It was not at all difficult on me, but rather very easy, and most of all also interesting, to imagine that though Karl May writes those traveller's tales down, he does it in such a way, as if they were not the product of his own mind, but as if they were dictated to him by this fictional "first person", which is the great question of mankind. Whether this assumption of mine was right, the future will soon show. The intention to give some of my characters native American and some of them oriental features led me quite naturally to a deep sympathy for the fate of those peoples. The extinction of the red race, which had been described as unstoppable, started to occupy my mind constantly. And about the ingratitude of the occident against the orient, to which it owes its entire material and mental culture, I had all kinds of serious thoughts. The welfare of mankind demands that there shall be peace between the two, no more exploitation and bloodshed. I was resolved to constantly emphasise this in my books and to kindle in my readers the love for the red race and for the inhabitants of the orient which we owe them as fellow human beings. These days, I am assured that I have not just achieved this in a few, but in hundreds of thousands, and I am inclined to believe this.