Igniatius leafs through his notebooks.
How can an ambiguous story give rise to several interpretations that are not only possible, but legitimate?
There is a moment in every analysis when exegesis is no longer enough.

Igniatius is struck by a phenomenon we generally prefer to ignore:
when reading his own words, he never finds exactly the story he remembered.
Not because he has forgotten details—though he sometimes confuses them—but because the text itself seems to have changed, rearranged itself, shifted, silently recomposed.

Contradictions accumulate, versions multiply, voices overlap, the intentions of Igniatius and Don Carotte… indeed contradict one another somewhat… but what matters more is that Igniatius no longer remembers certain events… and other events he does remember do not appear in the notebook at all.
He reads.

Just like his mind, the sky was filled with drifting clouds of orange ash; the wind carried them, with his thoughts, slowly out to sea.
And in that suspended instant, I felt a mixture of elevation and solitude, at the same time that the memory of that donkey returned to me… along with memories from many years earlier. Until then I had hardly spoken of it to Lucian, and for the moment, it remained in the state of myth. And I am its first witness who writes.

On our island, long before the encounter with Sang Chaud, the landscape was wild and the terrain brutal. Rocky spires rose abruptly, like the teeth of giants, sometimes sharply tilted, witnesses to the tectonic pressure still at work. Here one can guess the thrust of plates, there an ancient fracture filled with more recent basalt. From afar, these shapes appear stable, but upon approaching, one discovers a living ground, slowly fissuring, sometimes cracking under the internal heat, exhaling muffled rumbles felt more through the feet than the ears—well… I speak for myself… for he heard what I could not.

A few missing pages had been torn out… and suddenly the narrative speaks of Sang Chaud…

The roots had carried us, more or less willingly, toward cliffs plunging straight into the water. They are horizontally striated with superposed magmatic layers—shiny black, reddish brown, or slate grey—like a millefeuille of solidified lava. Natural arches have been carved by the sea into the softer cliffs, and under the incessant assault of the waves, some collapse, revealing new cavities, new chasms, sometimes hidden hot springs.