Who wrote it? "I don't want to bother you much with what happened to me personally," he began, showing in this remark the weakness of many tellers of tales who seem so often unaware of what their audience would best like to hear; "yet to understand the effect of it on me you ought to know how I got out there, what I saw, how I went up that river to the place where I first met the poor chap. It was the farthest point of navigation and the culminating point of my experience. It seemed somehow to throw a kind of light on everything about me - and into my thoughts. It was sombre enough, too - and pitiful - not extraordinary in any way - not very clear either. No, not very clear. And yet it seemed to throw a kind of light. "I had then, as you remember, just returned to London after a lot of Indian Ocean, Pacific, China Seas - a regular dose of the East - six years or so, and I was loafing about, hindering you fellows in your work and invading your homes just as though I had got a heavenly mission to civilize you. It was very fine for a time, but after a bit l did get tired of resting. Then I began to look for a ship - I should think the hardest work on earth. But the ships wouldn't even look at me. And I got tired of that game, too. "Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, When I grow up I will go there. The North Pole was one of these places, I remember. Well, I haven't been there yet, and shall not try now. The glamour's off. Other places were scattered about the Equator, and in every sort of latitude all over the two hemispheres. I have been in some of them, and ... well, we won't talk about that. But there was one yet - the biggest, the most blank, so to speak - that I had a hankering after. ..." Iain Wright won last month's Who Wrote It, identifying the poem Relic of Memory from Seamus Heaney's 1969 collection Door Into the Dark. The first entry identifying the above piece and its author, drawn after the close of entries on Monday, October 13, will receive a $30 voucher from University House. Click HERE to enter.