April 2, 1989 e.v. key entry by
 Bill Heidrick, T.G. of O.T.O.   --- needs further proof reading
 (c) O.T.O.   disk 4

 O.T.O.
 P.O.Box 430
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 USA

 (415) 454-5176 ----  messages only.


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                           P A R T   T H R E E


                    THE ADVENT OF THE AEON OF HORUS









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                               49



      This chapter is the climax of this book.  Its contents are so
 extraordinary, they demand such breadth and depth of preliminary
 explanation, that I am in despair.  It is so serious to me that my
 responsibility overwhelms me.  My entire previous life was but a
 preparation for this event, and my entire subsequent life has been not
 merely determined by it, but wrapped up in it.
      I have made several attempts to write the history of these few weeks,
 notably, that section of "The Temple of Solomon the King" which appears in
" "The Equinox," vol. I, no. VII.  I cannot with literary propriety
 incorporate these documents in the body of this book, but they are
 presented in an appendix, together with the text of "The Book of the Law."
      Most of the past nine years of my life have been preoccupied, each
 year more fully than the last, with the problem of proving to humanity in
 general the propositions involved.  To make the elements of my thesis as
 clear and distinct as possible, I shall endeavour to insulate them in
 sections.
      Ouarda and I left Helwan for Cairo.  (Date unascertained, probably on
 March 11th or 13th.)  We had taken an apartment (Address unascertained) on
 Wednesday, March 16th.  One day, having nothing special to do, I made the
 "Preliminary Invocation" referred to above.  I had no more serious purpose
 than to show her the sylphs as I might have taken her to the theatre.  She
 could not (or refused to) see them, but instead got into a strange state
 of mind.  I had never seen her anything at all like it before.  She kept
 on repeating dreamily, yet intensely, "They are waiting for you."  I was
 annoyed at her conduct.
      March 17th.  I don't remember whether I repeated my attempt to show
 her the sylphs, but probably did.  It is in my character to persist.  She
 again got into the same state and repeated her remarks, adding, "It is all
 about the child."  And "All Osiris."  I think I must have been annoyed by
 her contumacy.  Perhaps for this reason I invoked Thoth, the god of
 wisdom, presumably by the invocation printed in "Liber Israfel" ("The"
 "Equinox," Vol. I, Vo. VII), which I knew by heart.  I may also have been
 subconsciously wondering whether there was not something in her remarks,
 and wanted to be enlightened.  The record says, "Thoth, invoked with great
 success, indwells us."  But this strikes me as to some extent "written up"
 in a spirit of complacency, if not arrogance.  I remember nothing of any
 result.
      March 18th.  Possibly I repeated the invocation.  The record says,
 "Revealed that the waiter was Horus, whom I had offended and ought to
 invoke."

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 "Waiter" sounds like a sneer.  I thought is was sheer impudence of Ouarda
 to offer independent remarks.  I want her to see the sylphs.
      I must have been impressed by one point.  How did Ouarda know that I
 had offended Horus?  The troubles of Mathers were due to his excessive
 devotion to Mars, who represents one side of the personality of Horus, and
 no doubt I was inclined to err in the opposite directions, to neglect and
 dislike Mars as the personification of unintelligent violence.
      But was her bull's-eye a fluke?  Her mention of Horus gave me a
 chance to cross-examine her.  "How do you know that it is Horus who is
 telling you all this?  Identify him."  (Ouarda knew less Egyptology than
 ninety-nine Cairene tourists our of one hundred.)  Her answers were
 overwhelming.  The odds against her being right were one in many million.
      I allowed her to go on.  She instructed me how to invoke Horus.  The
 instructions were, from my point of view, pure rubbish.  I suggested
 amending them.  She emphatically refused to allow a single detail to be
 altered.  She promised success (whatever that might mean) on Saturday or
 Sunday.  If I had any aspiration left at all, it was to attain Samadhi
 (which I had not yet ever done).  She promised that I should do so.  I
 agreed to carry out her instructions, avowedly in order to show her that
 nothing could happen if you broke all the rules.
      On some day before March 23rd, Ouarda identified the particular god
 with whom she was in communication from a stele in the Boulak Museum,
 which we had never visited.  It is not the ordinary form of Horus but Ra-
 Hoor-Khuit1.  I was no doubt very much struck by the coincidence that the
 exhibit, a quite obscure and undistinguished stele, bore the catalogue
 number 666.  But I dismissed it as an obvious coincidence.
      March 19th.  I wrote out the ritual and did the invocation with
 little success.  I was put off, not only by my scepticism and the
 absurdity of the ritual, but by having to do it in robes at an open window
 on a street at noon.  She allowed me to make the second attempt at
 midnight.
      March 20th.  The invocation was a startling success.  I was told that
 "The Equinox of the Gods had come"; that is, that a new epoch had begun.
 I was to formulate a link between the solar-spiritual force and mankind.
      Various considerations showed me that the Secret Chiefs of the Third
 Order (that is, of the A.'. A.'. whose First and Second Orders were
 known as G.'. D.'. and R.R. et A.C. respectively) had sent a messenger
 to confer upon me the position which Mathers had forfeited.  I made it a
 condition that I should attain Samadhi; that is, that I should receive a
 degree of illumination, in default of which it would be presumptuous to
 put myself forward.
      March 21st-22nd-23rd.  There seems to have been a reaction after the
 success of the twentieth.  The phenomena faded out.  I tried to clear up
 my

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        1  WEH Note:  Ra-Heru-Khuti-Ba-Hadit is the particular Egyptian
          deity said to rule the 2nd Decan of Aries, in 1904, from 1st
          April to 10th April.















 position by the old methods and did a long Tarot divination which proved
 perfectly futile.
      March 23rd to April 7th.  I made inquiries about the stele and had
 the inscriptions translated into French by the assistant curator at
 Boulak.  I made poetic paraphrases of them.  Ouarda now told me to enter
 the room, where all this work had been done, exactly at noon on April 8th,
 9th and 10th, and write down what I heard, rising exactly at one o'clock.
 This is did.  In these three hours were written the three chapters of "The"
 "Book of the Law."
      The above statement is as succinct as I can make it.  By April 8th, I
 had been convinced of the reality of the communication and obeyed my
 wife's arbitrary instructions with a certain confidence.  I retained my
 sceptical attitude none the less.
      THE CLAIM OF "THE BOOK OF THE LAW" IN RESPECT OF RELIGION.  The
 importance of religion to humanity is paramount.  The reason is that all
 men perceive more of less the "First Noble Truth" --- that everything is
 sorrow; and religion claims to console them by an authoritative denial of
 this truth or by promising compensations in other states of existence.
 This claim implies the possibility of knowledge derived from sources other
 than the unaided investigation of nature through the senses and the
 intellect.  It postulates, therefore, the existence of one or more
 praeter-human intelligences, able and willing to communicate, through the
 medium of certain chosen man, to mankind a truth or truths which could not
 otherwise be known.  Religion is justified in demanding faith, since the
 evidence of the senses and the mind cannot confirm its statements.  The
 evidence from prophecy and miracle is valid only in so far as it goes to
 the credit of the man through whom the communication is made.  It
 establishes that he is in possession of knowledge and power different, not
 only in degree but in kind, from those enjoyed by the rest of man kind.
      The history of mankind teems with religious teachers.  These may be
 divided into three classes.
      1. Such men as Moses an Mohammed state simply that they have received
 a direct communication from God.  They buttress their authority by divers
 methods, chiefly threats and promises guaranteed by thaumaturgy; they
 resent the criticism of reason.
      2. Such men as Blake and Boehme claimed to have entered into direct
 communication with discarnate intelligence which may be considered as
 personal, creative, omnipotent, unique, identical with themselves or
 otherwise.  Its authority depends on "the interior certainty" of the seer.
      3. Such teachers as Lao-Tzu, the Buddha and the highest Gnana-yogis
 announce that they have attained to superior wisdom, understanding,
 knowledge and power, but make no pretence of imposing their views on

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 mankind.  They remain essentially sceptics.  They base their precepts on
 their own personal experience, saying, in effect, that they have found
 that the performance of certain acts and the abstention from others
 created conditions favourable to the attainment of the state which has
 emancipated them.  The wiser they are, the less dogmatic.  Such men indeed
 formulate their transcendental conception of the cosmos more or less
 clearly; they may explain evil as illusion, etc., but the heart of their
 theory is that the problem of sorrow has been wrongly stated, owing to the
 superficial or incomplete data presented by normal human experience
 through the senses, and that it is possible for men, but virtue of some
 special training (from Asana to Ceremonial Magick), to develop in
 themselves a faculty superior to reason and immune from intellectual
 criticism, by the exercise of which the original problem of suffering is
 satisfactorily solved.
      "The Book of the Law" claims to comply with the conditions necessary to
 satisfy all three types of inquirer.
      Firstly, it claims to be a document not only verbally, but literally
 inspired.  "Change not as much as the style of a letter; for behold!  thou,"
 "o prophet, shalt not behold all these mysteries hidden therein. ... This"
 "book shall be translated into all tongues: but always with the original in"
 "the writing of the Beast; for in the chance shape of the letters and their"
 "position to one another: in these are mysteries that no Beast shall"
 "divine.  Let him not seek to try: but one cometh after him, whence I say"
 "not, who shall discover the Key of it all."
      The author claims to be a messenger of the Lord of the Universe and
 therefore to speak with absolute authority.
      Secondly, it claims to be the statement of transcendental truth, and
 to have overcome the difficulty of expressing such truth in human language
 by what really amounts to the invention of a new method of communicating
 thought, not merely a new language, but a new type of language; a literal
 and numerical cipher involving the Greek and Hebrew Cabbalas, the highest
 mathematics etc.  It also claims to be the utterance of an illuminated
 mind co-extensive with the ultimate ideas of which the universe is
 composed.
      Thirdly, it claims to offer a method by which men may arrive
 independently at the direct consciousness of the truth of the contents of
 the Book; enter into communication directly on their own initiative and
 responsibility with the type of intelligence which informs it, and solve
 all their personal religious problems.
      Generally, "The Book of the Law" claims to answer all possible
 religious problems.  One is struck by the fat that so many of them are
 stated and settled separately in so short a space.
      Top return the the general question of religion.  The fundamental
 problem has never been explicitly stated.  We know that all religions,
 without exception, have broken down at the first test.  The claim of
 religion is to complete,

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 and (incidentally) to reverse, the conclusions of reason by means of a
 direct communication from some intelligence superior in kind to that o any
 incarnate human being.  I ask Mohammed, "How am I to know that the Koran
 is not your own compilation?"
      It is impertinent to answer that the Koran is so sublime, so musical,
 so true, so full of prophecies which time has fulfilled and confirmed by
 so many miraculous events that Mohammed could not have written it himself.
      The author of "The Book of the Law" foresaw and provided against all
 such difficulties by inserting in the text discoveries which I did not
 merely not make for years afterwards, but did not even possess the
 machinery for making.  Some, in fact, depend upon events which I had no
 part in bringing about.
      It may be said that nevertheless there may have been someone
 somewhere in the world who possessed the necessary qualities.  This again
 is rebutted by the fact that some of the allusions are to facts known to
 me alone.  We are forced to conclude that the author of "The Book of the"
 "Law" is an intelligence both alien and superior to myself, yet acquainted
 with my inmost secrets; and, most important point of all, that this
 intelligence is discarnate.
      The existence of true religion presupposes that of some discarnate
 intelligence, whether we call him God or anything else.  And this is
 exactly what no religion had ever proved scientifically.  And this is what
" "The Book of the Law" does prove by internal evidence, altogether
 independent of any statement of mine.  This proof is evidently the most
 important step in science that could possibly be made: for it opens up an
 entirely new avenue to knowledge.  The immense superiority of this
 particular intelligence, AIWASS, to any other with which mankind has yet
 been in conscious communication is shown not merely by the character of
 the book itself, but by the fact of his comprehending perfectly the nature
 of the proof necessary to demonstrate the fact of his own existence and
 the conditions of that existence.  And, further, having provided the proof
 required.
      THE CLAIM OF "THE BOOK OF THE LAW" TO OPEN UP COMMUNICATIONS WITH
 DISCARNATE INTELLIGENCE.  In the above section I have shown that the
 failure of previous religions is due, not so much to hostile criticism,
 but to their positive defect.  They have not made good their claim.  It
 has been shown above that "The Book of the Law" does demonstrate the prime
 position of religion in the only possible way.  The only possible
 argument, on the other side, is that the communication cannot have been
 made by a discarnate intelligence, because there are none such.  That
 indeed constitutes the supreme importance of "The Book of the Law."  But
 there is no a priori reason for doubting the existence of such beings.  We
 have long been acquainted with many discarnate forces.  Especially in the
 last few years science has been chiefly occupied with the reactions, not

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 merely of things which cannot be directly perceived by sense, but of
 forces which do not possess being at all in the old sense of the word.
      Yet the average man of science still denies the existence of the
 elementals of the Rosicrucian, the angels of the Cabbalist, the Nats,
 Pisachas and Devas of southern Asia, and the Jinn of Islam, with the same
 blind misosophy as in Victorian days.  It has apparently not occurred to
 him that his position in doubting the existence of consciousness except in
 connection with certain types of anatomical structure is really identical
 with that of the narrowest geocentric and anthropocentric Evangelicals.
      Our actions may be unintelligible to plants, they might plausibly
 argue that we are unconscious.  Our real reason for attributing
 consciousness to our fellow-men is that the similarity of our structure
 enables us to communicate by means of language, and as soon as we invent a
 language in which we can talk to anything soever, we begin to find
 evidence of consciousness.
     The was is therefore clear for me to come forward and assert
 positively that I have opened up communication with one such intelligence;
 or, rather, that I have been selected by him to receive the first message
 from a new order of beings.
     THE HISTORICAL CONCEPTION ON WHICH "THE BOOK OF THE LAW" IS BASED.
 Just as "The book of the Law" reconciles an impersonal and infinite
 interpretation of the cosmos with an egocentric and practical viewpoint,
 so it makes "infinite space" speak in the language of a goddess and deals
 with the details of eating and drinking:
      "Be goodly therefore: dress ye all in fine apparel; eat rich foods and"
 "drink sweet wines and wines that foam!  Also, take your fill and will of"
 "love as ye will, when, where and with whom ye will!  But always unto me."
      The emancipation of mankind from all limitations whatever is one of
 the main precepts of the Book.
      "Bind nothing!  Let there be no difference made among you between any"
 "one thing & any other thing; for thereby there cometh hurt."
      It reconciles cosmological conceptions which transcend time and space
 with a conventional, historical point of view.  In the first place it
 announces unconditional truth, but in the second is careful to state that
 the "Magical Formula" (or system of principles) on which the practical
 part of the book is based is not an absolute truth by one relative to the
 terrestrial time of the revelation.  (It is a strong point in favour of
 the Book that it make no pretence to settle the practical problems of
 humanity once and for all.  It contents itself with indicating a stage in
 evolution.)
      "The Book of the Law" presumes the existence of a body of initiates
 pledged to watch over the welfare of mankind and to communicate its own
 wisdom little by little in the measure of man's capacity to receive it.

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      The initiate is well aware that his instruction will be
 misinterpreted by malice, dishonesty and stupidity: and not being
 omnipotent, he has to acquiesce in the perversion of his precepts.  It is
 apart of the game.  "Liber I vel Magi" tells the Magus (here defined as the
 initiate charged with the duty of communicating a new truth to mankind) of
 what he may expect.
      There are many magical teachers but in recorded history we have
 scarcely had a dozen Magi in the technical sense of the word.  They may be
 recognized by the fact that their message may be formulated as a single
 word, which word must be such that it overturns all existing beliefs and
 codes.  We may take as instances the Word of Buddha-Anatta (absence of an
 atman or soul), which laid its axe to the root of Hindu cosmology,
 theology and psychology, and incidentally knocked away the foundation of
 the caste system; and indeed of all accepted morality.  Mohammed, again,
 with the single word Allah, did the same thing with polytheisms, patently
 pagan or camouflaged as Christian, of his period.
      Similarly, Aiwass, uttering the word Thelema (with all its
 implications), destroys completely the formula of the Dying God.  Thelema
 implies not merely a new religion, but a new cosmology, a new philosophy,
 a new ethics.  It co-ordinates the disconnected discoveries of science,
 from physics to psychology, into a coherent and consistent system.  Its
 scope is so vast that it is impossible even to hint at the universality of
 its application.  But the whole of my work, from the moment of its
 utterance, illustrates some phase of its potentiality, and the story of my
 life itself from this time on is no more than a record of my reactions to
 it.
      To recapitulate the historical basis of "The Book of the Law," let me
 say that evolution (within human memory) shows three great steps: 1. the
 worship of the Mother, when the universe was conceived as simple
 nourishment drawn directly from her; 2. the worship of the Father, when
 the universe was imagined as catastrophic; 3. the worship of the Child, in
 which we come to perceive events as a continual growth partaking in its
 elements of both these methods.
      Egyptian theology foresaw this progress of humanity and symbolized it
 in the triad of Isis, Osiris, Horus.  The neophyte ceremony of the Golden
 Dawn prepared me for the New Aeon; for, at the Equinox, the officer who
 represented Horus in the West took the throne of Osiris in the East.
      "The Book of the Law" is careful to indicate the nature of the formula
 implied by the assertion that the residing officer of the temple (the
 earth) is Horus, the Crowned and Conquering Child.  And again, Egyptology
 and psychology help us to understand what is implied, and what effect to
 expect, in the world of thought and action.
      Horus avenged his father Osiris.  We know that the sun (indeed, every
 element of nature) does not suffer death.

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      The child is not merely a symbol of growth, but of complete moral
 independence and innocence.  We may then expect the New Aeon to release
 mankind from its pretence of altruism, its obsession of fear and its
 consciousness of sin.  It will possess no consciousness of the purpose of
 its own existence.  It will not be possible to persuade it that it should
 submit to incomprehensible standards; it will suffer from spasms of
 transitory passion; it will be absurdly sensitive to pain and suffer from
 meaningless terror; it will be utterly conscienceless, cruel, helpless,
 affectionate and ambitious, without knowing why; it will be incapable of
 reason, yet at the same time intuitively aware of truth.  I might go on
 indefinitely to enumerate the stigmata of child psychology, but the reader
 can do it equally fro himself, and every idea that comes to him as
 characteristic of children will strike him as applicable to the events of
 history since 1904, from the Great War to Prohibition.  And if he possess
 any capacity for understanding the language of symbolism, he will be
 staggered by the adequacy and accuracy of the summary of the spirit of the
 New Aeon given in "The Book of the Law."
      I may now point out that the reign of the Crowned and Conquering
 Child is limited in time by "The Book of the Law" itself.  We learn that
 Horus will be in his turn succeeded by Thmaist, the Double-Wanded One; she
 who shall bring the candidates to full initiation, and though we know
 litter of her peculiar characteristics, we know at least that her name is
 justice.
      THE ETHICS OF "THE BOOK OF THE LAW."  Every cosmography implies some
 sort of ethical theory.  The Aeon of Osiris had been succeeded by that of
 Horus.  The Magical Formula of the Aeon being no longer that of the Dying
 god but that o the Crowned and Conquering Child, mankind is to govern
 itself accordingly.  A "righteous" act may be defined as one which fulfils
 the existing Magical Formula.  The motives which were valid in the Aeon of
 Osiris are sheer superstition today.  What were those motives and on what
 basis did they rest?  The old conception was that man was born to die;
 that eternal life had to be gained by a magical act, exactly as the sun
 had to be brought to life every morning by the priest.
      There is no need to develop the ethics of Thelema in detail, for
 everything springs with absolute logic from the singular principle, "Do
 what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law."  Or, to put it another way,
 "There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt."  And, "thou hast no right but
 to do thy will."  This formula itself springs ineluctably from the
 conception of the individual outlined in the preceding section.  "The word
 of Sin is Restriction."  "It is a lie, this folly against self."  The
 theory is that every man and every woman has each definite attributes
 whose tendency, considered in due relation to environment, indicate a
 proper course of action in each case.  To pursue this course of action is
 to do one's true will.  "Do that, and no other shall say nay."

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      The physical parallel still holds.  In a galaxy each star has its own
 magnitude, characteristics and direction and the celestial harmony is best
 maintained by its attending to its own business.  Nothing could be more
 subversive of that harmony than if a number of stars set up in a uniform
 standard of conduct insisted on everyone aiming at the same goal, going at
 the same pace, and so on.  Even a single star, by refusing to do its own
 will, by restricting itself in any way, would immediately produce
 disorder.
      We have a sentimental idea of self-sacrifice, the kind which is most
 esteemed by the vulgar and is the essence of popular Christianity.  It is
 the sacrifice of the strong to the weak.  This is wholly against the
 principles of evolution.  Any nation which does this systematically on a
 sufficiently large scale, simply destroys itself.  The sacrifice is in
 vain; the weak are not even save.  Consider the action of Zanoni in going
 to the scaffold in order to save his silly wife.  The gesture was
 magnificent; it was evidence of his own supreme courage and moral
 strength; but if everyone acted on that principle the race would
 deteriorate and disappear.
      There is here a conflict between private and public morality.  We
 should not protect the weak and the vicious from the results of their
 inferiority.  By doing so, we perpetuate the elements of dissolution in
 our own social body.  We should rather aid nature by subjecting every
 newcomer to the most rigorous tests of his fitness to deal with his
 environment.  The human race grew in stature and intelligence as long as
 the individual prowess achieved security, so that the strongest and
 cleverest people were able to reproduce their kind in the best conditions.
 But when security became general through the operation of altruism the
 most degenerate of the people were often the offspring of the strongest.
      "The Book of the Law" regards pity as despicable.  The reason is partly
 indicated in the above paragraph.  But further, to pity another man is to
 insult him.  He also is a star, "one, individual and eternal".  The Book
 does not condemn fighting --- "If he be a King, thou canst not hurt him."
      There are many ethical injunctions of a revolutionary character in
 the Book, but they are all particular cases of the general precept to
 realize one's own absolute God-head and to act with the nobility which
 springs from that knowledge.  Practically all vices springs from failure
 to do this.  For example: falsehood is invariably the child of fear in one
 form or another.
      With regard to what are commonly considered offences against
 morality, the undesirable results often observed are due to the same
 error.  Strong and successful men always express themselves fully, and
 when they are sufficiently strong no harm comes of it to themselves or to
 others.  When it does, it is practically always due to the artificial
 situation brought about by people who, having no business of their own,
 meddle in that of other people.  One may mention the cases of Sir Charles
 Dilke and Charles Steward Parnell.  It

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 didn't matter a straw to anybody outside the negligibly small circle of
 their acquaintances what these men did in their private lives, but England
 lost her greatest foreign minister and Ireland her greatest leader,
 because it was discovered that they were doing exactly the same as
 practically everyone else in their class.
      With regard again to personal jealousy and ill-regulated passion, is
 it too much to say that nine tenths of the social misery not due to
 poverty arises from these hallucinations?  "The Book of the Law" sweeps them
 out of existence.  "There shall be no property in human flesh."  Nobody
 has a right to say what anyone else shall or shall not do with his or her
 body.  Establish this principle of absolute respect for others and the
 whole nightmare of sex is dispelled.  Blackmail and prostitution
 automatically lose their raison d'ˆtre.  The corrupting influence of
 hypocrisy breaks like a rotten reed.  The sweating of "female labour
 cheapened by prostitution" (as Bernard Shaw says) becomes impossible.
      I have written at considerable length in recent years on the ethical,
 as well as on the cosmographical problems solved by the Law of Thelema.  I
 need not go into them more deeply in this place .  But the subsequent
 events of my life will furnish constant illustration of how every time I
 violated the Law, as I sometimes did with what I was ass enough to call
 the noblest motives, I got myself into a mess --- and failed to benefit
 those on whose behalf I had chosen to make a fool of myself.






















 {402}























                               50


      It is part of my character to rest on my oars at the very moment when
 a spurt would take me past the post.  I begin to be recognized as the one
 poet in England: "Good," I say to myself, "I needn't bother about that any
 more."  I acquire most of the world's records as a mountaineer --- that
 lets me out.  "Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero pulsanda tellus."  I
 reach eminence in Magick; it is the signal for me to drop it; in
 mysticism, and I lose my interest.  Now, charged by the Secret Chiefs of
 the Third Order with a mission of such importance that the last event in
 the world's history of importance, even approaching it, was Mohammed's, I
 get cold feet, carry out my instructions as perfunctorily as possible, and
 even try to find excuses for postponing such work as I could not actually
 avoid.
      I made a certain number of studies of "The Book of the Law;" for even
 then I was bound to admit that Aiwass had shown a knowledge of the Cabbala
 immeasurably superior to my own.  I had the manuscript typed.  I issued a
 circular letter to a number of my friends, something in the nature of a
 proclamation of the New Aeon, but I took no trouble to follow it up.  I
 took a certain number of wide-reaching plans for assuming responsibility,
 but they remained in the stage of reverie.  I dropped the whole business,
 to all intents and purposes.  I completely abandoned my diary.  I even
 neglected a really first-rate opportunity for bringing "The Book of the Law"
 into public notice, for Mrs. Besant was on the ship by which Ouarda and I
 returned to Europe, and I conversed a great deal with her about sacred
 subjects.  In Paris, I wrote a formal letter to Mathers informing him that
 the Secret Chiefs had appointed me visible head of the Order, and declared
 a new Magical Formula.  I did not expect or receive an answer.  I declared
 war on Mathers accordingly, but it was a "brutum fulmen."
      The fact of the matter was that I resented "The Book of the Law" with
 my whole soul.  For one thing, it knocked my Buddhism completely on the
 head.  "Remember all ye that existence is pure joy; that all the sorrows"
 "are but as shadows; they pass & are done; but there is that which remains."
      I was bitterly opposed to the principles of the Book on almost every
 [point of morality.  The third chapter seemed to me gratuitously
 atrocious.  My soul, infinitely sad at the universal sorrow, was
 passionately eager to raise humanity.  And lo! the Magical Formula
 denounced pity as damnable, acclaimed war as admirable and in almost every
 other way was utterly repugnant to my ideas.  I did not understand the
 fundamental principles of

 {403}





















 the initiation of mankind; and (in my own case) I did not realize that
 Aiwass was not necessarily responsible for the character of his message
 any more than the newspaper for reporting an earthquake.
      The Secret Chiefs had informed me that a New Aeon implied the
 breaking up of the civilization existing at the time; obviously to change
 the Magical Formula of the planet is to change all moral sanctions and the
 result is bound to appear disastrous.  The Cult of The Dying God
 introduced by Dionysus destroyed the Roman virtue and smashed the Roman
 culture.  (Possibly the introduction of the worship of Osiris in an
 earlier epoch was primarily responsible for the decay of Egyptian
 civilization.)  The nature of Horus being "Force and Fire", his aeon would
 be marked by the collapse of humanitarianism.  The first act of his reign
 would naturally be to plunge the world into the catastrophe of a huge and
 ruthless war.
      The Secret Chiefs told me that this war was imminent and that they
 had chosen me as their representative on account of my comprehensive
 knowledge of the mysteries, my correct understanding of their real import
 and my literary ability.  The chief duty which they laid upon me was to
 publish the Secret Wisdom of the Ages in such a form that after the wreck
 of civilization the scholars of subsequent generations would be able to
 restore the traditions.  I was to issue a compendium of the methods by
 which man may attain the God-head.  The released me from my obligation of
 secrecy.
      The responsibility of this, apart from anything else, was sufficient
 to stagger me.  I had been taught to dread the result of publishing the
 least part of the Secret Knowledge: in unworthy hands the most appalling
 mischief was only too likely to ensue.  I had been almost absurdly
 scrupulous with regard to the secrets entrusted to me; indeed my
 experience had already shown me what shocking messes had been made by
 apparently trivial indiscretions on the part of others.  I was not even
 proud that the choice of the Secret Chiefs had fallen upon me; I was too
 well aware of my incapacity and indolence.
      The task of reducing the Magical and mystical methods of every time
 and clime to a coherent and intelligible form frightened me.  On the one
 hand, I was reluctant to attempt to ambitious a work; on the other,
 acutely anxious lest I should prove unworthy of my office.
      I have always been utterly contemptuous of the criticism of people
 whom I do not respect.  I frankly despise Keats for having been upset by
 the review of "Endymion"; but the correlative of this is over-
 sensitiveness about people whom I regard as authorities.  The least word
 of admonition of Eckenstein about climbing would throw me into agonies of
 self-reproach.  When Allan reproved me for some error in Yoga, I was
 overwhelmed with shame.
      My position was therefore very difficult.  I was bound to the Secret
 Chiefs by the most solemn of obligations.  I never dreamt of trying to
 minimize

 {404}


















 my responsibility to them, yet they had cut across the whole trend of my
 aspiration.  The magical part o me was, in a manner of speaking, stunned.
      My wife and I passed a short time in Paris and renewed old ties.  One
 incident stands out in my memory as peculiarly amusing.  We asked Arnold
 Bennett to lunch at Paillard's.  He was completely overpowered by the
 deference of the MaŒtre d'h“tel, who knew me very well, and his
 embarrassment at being introduced to such splendours was childishly
 charming.  He was, of course, enormously pleased and very kindly offered
 to give me an introduction to H. G. Wells.  As Arnold Bennett had
 gratified the public with a highly spiced description of me in "Paris"
 "Nights,"  hope that he will take it as a compliment if I imitate his
 frankness in the matter of personalities.  His accent and dialect made his
 English delightfully difficult.  As we were leaving the restaurant, he
 told me that there was one thing about Wells that I mustn't mind: he spoke
 English with an accent.

                                        "59 rue de Grenelle, Paris"

              "14 Feby 1911"
     Dear Aleister Crowley,
          Many thanks.  I am very glad to have the volume.  I will mention
     it in "The New Age," but I no longer write for "T. P's. Weekly."  Not a
     portrait of you --- my dear Crowley --- in the "English Review!" for all
     you sat for was the waistcoat, the title and the poetry.  All these
     portraits are composite.

                                Yours sincerely,

                                                   ARNOLD BENNETT

Alas!  I lack the literary skill to construct composite portraits.  My own
poor effort is the most crude photography.  Also, I beg him to excuse my
personalities.  He is too great a man at heart to resent jests at the
expense of his perishable vehicle; he is himself a star bright-blazing, the
more glorious for the thickness of the terrestrial vapours which it has had
to pierce.
     We wandered back to Boleskine, after arranging with a doctor named
Percival Bott to come and stay with us and undertake the accouchement.  I
asked my Aunt Annie to preside over the household, and an old friend of
Gerald's (Kelly) and mine, Ivor Back, at this time a surgeon at St.
George's, to make up the house party.  Ivor Back is one of the most amusing
companions possible, to those who can stand him.  He knows a good deal
about literature and had published in "The Hospital" magazine some of the
poems in which I had celebrated various diseases.  I dedicated my "In"
"Residence," a collection of my undergraduate verses, to him, and he
collaborated with me to a certain extent in the composition of various
masterpieces of the lighter kind.  He and Gerald are also responsible for
numberous improvements in the preface

{405}
















to "Alice, An Adultery."  He also edited the three volumes of my "Collected"
"Words," supplying learned notes to divers obscure passages.
     My activities as a publisher were at this time remarkable.  I had
issued "The God-Eater" and "The Star & the Garter" through Charles Watts & Co.
of the Rationalist Press Association, but there was still no such demand
for my books as to indicate that I had touched the great heart of the
British public.  I decided that it would save trouble to publish them
myself.  I decided to call myself the Society for the Propagation of
Religious Truth, and issued "The Argonauts", "The Sword of Song", "the Book of"
"the Goetia of Solomon the King", "Why Jesus Wept", "Oracles", "Orpheus", "Gargoyles"
and "The Collected Works".  I had simply no idea of business.  Besides this,
I was in no need of money; my responsibility to the gods was to write as I
was inspired; my responsibility to mankind was to publish what I wrote.
But it ended there.  As long as what I wrote was technically accessible to
the public through the British Museum, and such places, my hands were
clean.
     And yet I took a course implying a diametrically opposite state of
mind.  I printed a large edition of "The Star & the Garter", and issued it at
a shilling, with the idea of reaching the people who might have been unable
to buy my more expensive books.  I printed a leaflet and circularized the
educated classes.  (I have no copy available.)  The meat of the circular
was the offer of one hundred pounds for the best essay on my work.  The
business idea was to induce people to buy my "Collected Works" in order to
have material for the essay.  This offer led ultimately to far-reaching
results; in fact, it determined the course of my life for a number of
years.  The winner of the prize became an intimate friend and colleague.
His scholarship, acumen, enthusiasm and indefatigability proved most
important factors in the execution of the orders of the Secret Chiefs.
     Meanwhile, we had a glorious time at Boleskine.  What with the salmon
and the venison and my cellar, billiards and rock scrambling, the good
company and the perfect summer, life passed like an ecstatic dream.  In
summer in the Highlands, time seems to forgive.  At midnight one can sit
and read in the open air even in the absence of the moon.  Night is "one
faint eternal eventide of gems".
     One of our adventures is worthy of record.  It is one of the most
startling incidents that I have ever known in all my experience of
climbing.  Beyond the Italian garden I had constructed a large trout pond,
with Canadian canoe and sacred spring complete.  From the farther bank, a
short slope leads to a precipitous cliff which affords an admirable variety
of rock problems.  Having taught Bott and Back the elements of the sport,
we decided to attempt a more serious climb.  Across the loch, beyond Glen
Moriston, is a well-marked gully, through which pours a torrent from
Mealfuarvonie.  Eckenstein and I marked this down; but during his visits it
had always been merely

{406}




















a frantic waterfall.  The long spell of dry weather made me think there was
a chance to climb it, so I rowed over with Bott and Back, and started on
the lowest pitch.  This is a broad precipice of water-worn rock, perhaps a
hundred to a hundred and fifty feet high.  A good deal of water was coming
over, but there seemed a possible way up.  Starting outside the true left
of the stream, I hoped to work my way up the bare slabs to within twenty
feet of the edge, where the stream pitched over, and then climb obliquely
to the left until I was actually in the torrent; for its broken character
indicated good hold (for both hand and foot) which I trusted would prove
sufficient to enable me to pull myself up despite the weight of the water.
     At the best the climb was very exposed and I ought not really to have
attempted it in any but first-class company.  There was no alternative to
my proposed route.  Where the water had not washed the rock clean, the
pitch was a dripping precipice of greasy, mossy slabs, set at a frightful
angle, with practically no hand-hold or foot-hold at all.  Such cracks as
existed gave obvious evidence of disintegration, so that any apparent hold
must certainly be rotten.  I would not have attempted it with Eckenstein,
and I would have refused to follow him had he wished to attempt it himself!
     I led up the pitch with Bott as second man and Back as third.  I
reached the most critical part of the climb.  My holds were the merest
friction holds.  I could not have supported a rabbit.  I half expected to
come off; and I knew that Bott (though reasonably safe himself, or I should
not have gone on) could no nothing to save me if I fell.  Back, in a
perfectly safe position far below (we had a long rope), saw how insecure I
was.  He completely lost his nerve.  He began to utter incoherent cries and
to untie himself from the rope.  The act was, of course, outrageous, but he
was not responsible.  He took no notice of my orders to keep quiet and not
be a damphool.  I could not even come down with any safety, Bott being
naturally upset by Back's hysteria, so I called to Ivor to stay where he
was and we would come round for him.
     In the circumstances, my best course was to finish the climb as
quickly as I could and I went on at my best pace.  In the roar of the
falling water which swamped me, I could, of course, see and hear nothing.
I dragged myself up the water fall by sheer force; I had to trust for hand-
and foot-hold to my previous observations, for I had to keep my eyes shut
against the rush of the torrent.  I hauled myself through the gap on the
brink and wedged myself against the rocks which confined it, head first.  I
found myself in a sort of cauldron where I could stand with my head and
shoulders above water.  I had climbed the pitch.  I called to Bott to come
on, and pulled him up the slabs on the rope.  It had been a terrific climb;
one of the most dangerous I had ever done.
     My anxiety had been increased by seeing that Back, having untied
himself,

{407}





















had not sat down quietly as ordered, but started to scramble towards the
utterly unclimbable and dangerously deceptive slabs of dripping moss.  Bott
and I extricated ourselves from the cauldron without further difficulty.
And then I began to wonder whether the nymph of the waterfall had not
played me a trick!  I was certainly suffering from some kind of
hallucination.  Had my anxiety about Back created a phantasm?  For there,
on the slopes above us was an apparition in his shape, gesticulating,
muttering and shouting by turns.  But it was Back in the flesh!  He had
done the impossible thing: he had climbed the unclimbable cliff!  so
incredible was the feat that I was at pains to go round and look at the
place again from below.  My judgment had not deceived me --- there was no
sort of way up --- yet the torn moss and a few fresh broken bits of rotten
rock proved his passage.  To this day I regard the facts as the least
credible of any that have ever come my way.
     When Rose and I first arrived at Boleskine, we had made a sort of
sporadic effort to carry out some of the injunction of Aiwass.  We had
arranged before leaving Egypt for the "abstruction" of the Stele of
Revealing.  I did not understand the word or the context, and contented
myself with having a replica made by one of the artists attached to the
museum.  We now proceeded to prepare the "perfume" and the "Cakes"
according to the prescription given in chapter III, verses 23-9.
     We had resumed Magical work, in a desultory way, on finding that
Mathers was attacking us.  He succeeded in killing most of the dogs.  (At
this time I kept a pack of bloodhounds and went man-hunting over the
moors.)  The servants too were constantly being made ill, one in one way,
and one in another.  We therefore employed the appropriate talismans from
"The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin" against him, evoking Beelzebub
and his forty-nine servitors.  Rose had suddenly acquired the power of
clairvoyance.  Her description of these servitors is printed in "The Bagh-i-"
"Muattar", pages 39, 40.  (I may mention: Nimorup, a stunted dwarf with large
head and ears.  His lips are greeny bronze and slobbery.  Nominon, a large
red spongy jelly-fish with one greenish luminous spot like a nasty mess.
Holastri, an enormous pink bug.)  As to this perfume of "The Book of the"
"Law", "let it be laid before me, and kept thick with perfumes of your
orison: it shall become full of beetles as it were and creeping things
sacred unto me."  One day, to my amazement, having gone into the bathroom
to bathe, I discovered a beetle.  As I have said, I take no interest in
natural history and know nothing of it.
     But this beetle attracted my attention at once.  I had never seen
anything like it before.  It was about an inch and a half long and had a
single horn nearly as long as itself.  The horn ended in a small sphere
suggestive of an eye.  From the moment, for about a fortnight, there was an
absolute plague of these beetles.  They were not merely in the house, they
were on the rocks,

{408}




















in the gardens, by the sacred spring, everywhere!  But I never saw one
outside the estate.  I sent a specimen to London by the experts were unable
to identify the species.
     Here was a tangible piece of Magick.  It ought to have convinced me
that "The Book of the Law" meant business.  Instead, it left me absolutely
cold.  I experienced a certain proud glee, much as I had in the King's
Chamber of the Great Pyramid, but there it stopped.  I took the necessary
measures to protect Rose against the murderous attack of Mathers, and went
on playing billiards.  The attack was, however, prolonged and deadly.  We
were putting central heating into the house, and attempting to construct a
small golf course on the estate.  (Idiot! why not a tennis court on the
Ennerdale Face of the Pillar?)
     Ivor and I were playing billiards one morning after breakfast, when we
heard screams and oaths from the direction the the kitchen.  I snatched up
a salmon gaff as the readiest weapon and we hurried out.  One of the
workmen had become suddenly maniacal and attacked my wife, who was making
her usual inspection of the offices.  It was the work of a moment to gaff
the offender and thrust him into the coal cellar, and send for the police.
As they were a long time in coming, the animal made several attempts to
crawl out of the chute, but our vigilance succeeded in baffling him, and he
was duly handed into custody.  But nothing followed!  It is one of the
peculiarities of Scotch law that there is no private prosecution unless the
police choose to take up any give case; you can be murdered "ad libitum"
without possibility of redress.  As the police in the Highlands are largely
recruited from the assassin class --- there is no other --- one can well
understand why the gentry maintain, to a great extent, the ancient custom
of surrounding themselves with armed retainers.
     As soon as Beelzebub got on the job, the magical assaults ceased; and,
deprived of the stimulus to perform Magick, my interest faded once more.
We spent out time in sport an society, tempered by pregnancy, as if there
were no hereafter.  I used my official titles and position without
emphasis, very much as a peer takes advantage of his social privileges
without ever giving a thought to the Hose of Lords as a political
institution.
     On July 28th my wife gave birth to a girl, called Nuit Ma Ahathoor
Hecate Sappho Jezebel Lilith.  Nuit was given in homage to our Lady of the
Stars; Ma, goddess of Justice, because the sign of Libra was rising;
Ahathoor, goddess of Love and Beauty, because Venus rules Libra; I'm not
sure abut the name Hecate, but it may have been as a compliment to the
infernal gods; a poet could hardly do less than commemorate the only lady
who ever wrote poetry, Sappho; Jezebel still held her place as my favourite
character in Scripture; and Lilith, of course, holds undisputed possession
of my affections in the realm of demons.

{409}





















     Duncombe Jewell remarked later on that she had died of acute
nomenclature.  Cad.  In my ears rang that terrible cry of Macduff, "He had
no children."
     Everything had gone as well as possible, and we were the happiest
house party in the Highlands.  There was only one problem, that of keeping
my wife amused during her convalescence.  She was normally an intensely
active, joyous being, but she had absolutely no resources.  She could not
play even the simplest game of cards, and of my whole library of three
thousand books and more there were only some half dozen that she cared to
read.  Hill Caine was too deep for her.  It was up to me to produce an
example of the only kind of literature she understood.
     Now the objection to this form of art is its monotony; its
preoccupation with detailed incident precludes a plot, and the range of its
characters is deplorably limited.  The men are nearly always priests or
peers; the women countesses, school mistresses or milliners.  These books
possess the merit of frankness of the most engaging kind; but they
frequently strain one's credulity.  The heroes of medieval romance are not
so inhumanly disproportionate to the facts of life; that the author could
claim the title of realist only ads to one's disgust.  They arose every
instinct of my puritanism with almost insane intensity.  I suppose I was
really furious at the fact that the wife whom I loved so passionately and
honoured so profoundly should be intellectually circumscribed in this way.
My only remedy was a "reductio ad absurdum".  I resolved to write a novel
myself --- one of this kind, but it should be very much better and bigger.
And damn the expense.  No priest nor monk should be my hero.  I would have
an archbishop.  He should not be as superhuman as six men; he should do
better than six hundred.  My models had annoyed my by the pathetic paucity
of their vocabulary.  Having the excellent dictionary of John B. Farmer and
W. E. Henley, I was able to avoid repeating myself.  However,  I took the
liberty of inventing many new words and phrases to add further variety.  So
for every detail, I would show up the imbecile ineptitude to this type of
literature by exaggerating its faults at every point.
     I pounded off a chapter a day of this novel on my typewriter and read
it to my wife, Gerald, Ivor and the rest of the house party, except my
aunt, who shared the psychology of my wife, only on the other side of the
fence.  Rose could not see in the least what I meant; like Colonel Gormley,
anything whatever that turned her mind towards the subject of love produced
a direct excitement and was pleasing.  The effect was the same on my aunt,
except that she had schooled herself to pretend that it was unpleasing.
     Even in France the "pudibond" fury of the bourgeoisie is rampant.  Part
of the public horror of sexual irregularity so-called is due to the fact
that everyone knows himself essentially guilty.  "Methings the lady doth
protest too much."  If men would face the facts of life, including their
own constitutions

{410}




















ad they are, practically all abuse and perversions would disappear.  They
are for the most part morbid phantasms of putrefaction, aggravated by the
attempt at suppression.  The wound of Amfortas will not heal because it has
never been properly opened and rendered aseptic.
     Madame Bovary was assumed to be a provincial Phryne.  The story of her
adultery was condemned as "immoral", as tending to incite illicit passions.
Its critics had been simply unable to read the book.  Flaubert was in
reality grinding his heel into the woman's foolish face; he was showing
that her conduct was not romantic and voluptuous, but sordid, stupid,
bestial and anaphrodisiac.  What could be more puritanical than "Ghosts"?  It
is the most frightful indictment of immorality that has ever been penned.
Yet to the Anglo-Saxon it is "immoral".  They don't understand a word, but
it makes them think of their own beastliness; with the result that they
discuss it furtively, licking their lips, and cry in the market place that
it is an offence to their purity.
     I have never been able to comply with these foully perverse
conventions.  I face anything frankly and the phantasm fades.  I do not
permit any author to play on my passions.  I read a book with my soul, and
only those books appeal to me whose authors speak sincerely and sanely such
truth as has been given them.  I utterly loathe the author who practises on
popular psychology.  The sentimentalism of Charles Dickens, the eroticism
of D. H. Lawrence, the pornographic religiosity of Mrs. Humphry Ward1 seem
to me to be appeals to the appetites of the unintelligent.  They prostitute
their scrap of art exactly as quacks do when they try to persuade people
that a pain in the back always means Bright's disease; or that every
trifling symptom, from headache to ingrowing toe-nails, is the result of
secret vice.
     The plain truth of the matter is that love stories are only fit for
the solace of people in the insanity of puberty.  No healthy adult human
being can really care whether so-and-so does or does not succeed in
satisfying his physiological uneasiness by the aid of some particular
person or not.  "The Woman in White" and "The Moonstone" illustrate the
situation with singular clearness.  Despite the astounding power of Wilkie
Collins to draw characters, he cannot make the heroine interesting.  Laura
Fairlie is little better than an imbecile even when not actually suffering
from dementia.
     The artist's subconscious mind play this sort of thing on him as a
joke.  He gets so disgusted with himself that he avenges himself on the
dummy which offends him.  In these tow novels, the heroes are represented
as exceptionally fine fellows in every way, but for all their heroic deeds
they seem wishy-washy, sordid dummies; for the simple reason that they have
no object in life but to attain sexual possession of so many pounds of
flesh.  Nor does the interest of these books really depend on love.  Great
artists

{411}


        1  I have never read a word of her.  But somehow I don't like the
          idea.
















always find more serious themes.  Sex is a means of intoxication; it is
therefore proper to celebrate it in lyrics.  But when one is sober, as one
is when reading a novel, one doesn't want sex thrust down one's throat.
One doesn't mind white wine in the sauce of the fish, and the man who is
upset by its presence is a neurotic.  As for the man who wants his cook to
make his sauce so that he can get drunk on it --- I simply don't want to
meet him.  But that is what the Anglo-Saxon public does, and that is why I
don't want to meet it.
     Shakespeare has few stories of which the interest depends on love;
when it does, the love always implies ruin, as in "Romeo and Juliet", "Anthony"
"and Cleopatra" and "Othello".  His only love stories with a happy ending, bar
absolutely mechanical d‚nouements, are where he is secretly gratifying his
secret perversity, as in "Twelfth Night" and "As You Like It".  Our greatest
novelists have complied with convention by inserting a love interest ready
made; "Tom Jones", "Roderick Random" and so on; but the interest is hardly even
secondary.  All our greatest masterpieces treat love in its proper relation
to life.  "Jonathan Wild", "Moll Flanders", "Robinson Crusoe", "Tristram Shandy",
"Gulliver's Travels", "A Tail of a Tub", "The Pilgrim's Progress", "The Pickwick"
"Papers", "Vanity Fair", "Armadale", "The Shaving of Shagpat", "The Way of all"
"Flesh", the Cabell epic: what have these to do with love?
     In France it is the same.  It can be done once.  Aucassin and
Nicolette.  But afterwards!  Think of a nice young girl introduced into "La"
"Peau de chagrin", "La Cousine Bette", "Le Cousin Pons", "Le PŠre Goiiot", "Eug‚nie"
"Grandet", "Le Colonel Chabert".  There is not one story in all Balzac where
love is the saving or even the main motive.  Dumas --- think of d'Artagnan
in love with a nice young lady and living happy ever after!  (The love
interest in "A Gentleman of France" and "Under the Red Robe" explains why
Stanley Weyman's imitations of Dumas are so deplorably vulgar.)  What
happens to the Vicomte de Bragelonne (will all the virtues) when he falls
in love?  Russia supplies the extreme case, for in that country love has
always been understood as a definitely diabolical pitfall.
     It is true that there is a modern school founded by Emily Bront‰, from
Thomas Hardy to D. H. Lawrence, whose plots turn on the sexual relation of
the characters, but wherever such books are healthy, the theme is that the
exaggeration of the importance of such relations leads to disaster.
     To return to my "jeu d'esprit" and the psychology involved.  I have for
my solicitor one of the most acute observers in the world.  He said to me
the other day, "You seem never to be able to do anything as anyone else
would."  I retorted, "No; nor by halves," which was smart --- but hardly a
rebuttal.  The fact is, I consider everything "sub specie universali, sub"
"specie aeternitatis."  It come natural to me to write an article on the
parish council election in Little Piddlington for the eyes of the
philosophers of two centuries hence.

{412}





















I cannot bring myself to believe that anything which is going on at the
present time has any real existence.  It is a meaningless letter in a word
and its value depends on the rest of the letters.  "A" and "O" are in
themselves mere varieties of breathing, yet one helps to make "hag", and
the other "hog" --- one "cot", and the other "cat".  Unless I know the
consonants I cannot tell whether I need an "a" or an "o".
     Now this perception is obvious to everybody, yet everybody acts as if
he knew exactly what would be the result of writing "a" instead of "o",
assuming that he is free to choose which he will do --- which he isn't.
But I bring this principle into my life; it governs me in every action
outside my regular reflexes. I am really aware that I do not know whether
it would be to my advantage to be hanged.  I have only attained to a
standard of conduct by referring all my judgments to my will, and until I
knew what my true will was, I was utterly at sea.
     To apply these ideas to the issue which we are discussing.  I knew
that a poet is incapable of recognizing his best work, but I knew also that
though good technique does not mean good work bad technique does mean bad
work.  So I used to experiment with new forms by choosing a ridiculous or
obscene subject, lest I should be tempted to publish a poem whose technique
showed inexperience.
     Ivor and I, with some assistance from Gerald, collected such of these
manuscripts as had not been destroyed, and with "the Nameless Novel", we
composed a volume1 to carry on the literary form of "White Stains" and "Alice";
that is, we invented a perpetrator for the atrocities.
     I do now know what mischievous whim induced me to have the book
printed, but I was absolutely innocent of any desire to rival the exploit
of Alfred de Musset and George Sand, the "Femmes" and "Hombres" of Verlain, or
the "jeu d'esprit" of Mark Twain of which Sir Walter Raleigh is the hero.  I
did not even hope to get the British government to give me a pension of
four thousand pounds a year, as id did to John Cleland.
     This literary diversion, and the regular sports of the Highlands, kept
us happy; but, as the summer faded, we broke up.  I did not want Rose and
the baby to have to endure a Highland winter and towards the end of October
went off to St. Moritz to make arrangements for them to come out.  Rose,
however, decided to take a holiday from nursing and left the child with her
parents under the charge of the nurse, who was of course a very highly
trained woman.  She joined me at St. Moritz in November.  I had always been
enthusiastic about winter sports of every kind with the exception of "ski-"
"l„ufing", which I appreciate as a means of covering necessary distances, but
not otherwise.  I like swooping down the slopes, and an occasional jump is
rather good fun.  But to go back up hill again!  No, thank you!

{413}


        1  "Snowdrops from a Curate's Garden".




















     The Cresta run was great joy and the sports committee paid me the
greatest compliment of asking my advice about its construction.  But it
seemed to me ideally perfect.  The only suggestions which I had to make
were connected with safety; and, in fact, several men have been killed
since through the precautions proposed by me not having been taken.  I
cannot blame anyone; my ideas were perhaps hardly practicable.  Something
should doubtless have been done about the level crossing, where a man going
at sixty miles an hour or so came off second best when he hit a cart.  But
that is a rare chance.  The constant danger is that an unskilful rider
thrown over the walls of Battledore and Shuttlecock may strike the same
place as a previous misadventurer.  In this case he will land, not on soft
snow but on an irregular mass of regelated ice.  He is sure to cut himself
and may easily get killed.  The walls of the run should be sufficiently
high and steep to make it impossible for a toboggan to leave the trough, in
which case he would have to be very clever to come to much harm, provided
he is properly clothed and hangs on to his seat.  The difficulty is that
men are so keen for the season to open that the run is often built when
there is not nearly enough snow.
     The frost began to break and we went back to England.  I propose to
mention an incident, despite its strictly medical character, as a warning
to the world of the utter idiocy of woman as a class and  the criminal
idiocy of trained nurses in particular.  They are the most dangerous
animals in the community.  They are so proud of their disconnected scraps
of medical knowledge that they are always trying to usurp the position of
the physician.  In the present instance my wife came within an ace of death
on a false alarm which two words from a qualified practitioner would have
dispelled.
     Since the birth of the baby, she had not settled down into the normal
course of her physiological life.  She jumped to the conclusion that she
was pregnant again, though her symptoms, of course, implied nothing of the
sort.  Instead of seeking a doctor she went hysterically to the nurse who
proceeded to dose her with ergot.  As no abortion took place she redoubled
her efforts.  I had been away on business for two or three days and
returned to find her in a perfectly frightened condition.  I forced a
confession and dragged her to the station (we were staying with her family
near Bournemouth) and got her to the Savoy before midnight.  Bott and Back,
summoned by telegram, were waiting for us.  They were frankly delighted,
never having seen such a bad case of ergot poisoning in their lives.
     I really don't know why I didn't prosecute that filthy nurse.  Even if
her diagnosis had been correct, I consider criminal abortion in any
circumstances soever as one of the foulest kinds of murder.  Apart from
anything else, it nearly always ruins the health of the woman, when it
fails to kill her.

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     The vigour of my views on this point strengthens my general attitude
on the question of sexual freedom.  I believe that very few women, left to
themselves, would be so vile as to commit this sin against the Holy Ghost;
to thwart the deepest instincts of nature at the risk of health and Life,
to say nothing of imprisonment.  Yet criminal abortion is one of the
commonest of crimes and one most generally condoned by what I must
paradoxically call secret public opinion.  And the reason is that our
social system makes it shameful and punishable by poverty for a woman to do
what evolution has spent ages in constructing her to do, save under
conditions with which the vast majority of women cannot possibly comply.
The remedy lies entirely with public opinion.  Let motherhood be recognized
as honourable in itself, and even the pressure of poverty would not prevent
any but a few degenerate women, with perverse appetites for pleasure, from
fulfilling their function.  In the case of such it would indeed be better
that they and their children perish.
     There is yet a further point.  My marriage taught me many lessons, and
this not the least: when women are not devoted to children --- a few rare
individuals are capable of other interests --- they take a morbid pleasure
in conspiring against a husband, especially if he be a father.  They take
advantage of his preoccupation with his work in the world to conceive and
execute every kind of criminally cunning abomination.  The belief in
witchcraft was not all superstition; its psychological roots were sound.
Women who are thwarted in their natural instincts turn inevitably to all
kinds of malignant mischief, from slander to domestic destruction.
     I am afraid that my adventures have lost me the citizenship of the
world.  Alastor is my name, the Spirit of solitude, the Wanderer in the
Waste.  I am only at home in the Elysian Fields, conversing with the mighty
men of old.  I dislike London, not because it is busy and noisy and dirty
and dark and sordid, ad so on, but because it is so pettily provincial.  I
live in a city beyond time and space; how much more beyond the ticking
centuries and the itching inches of London!  I have accustomed myself so
long to look at the universe as a while that its parts have become
imperceptible.  When I am reminded of them, it is like being reminded of
one's eye by getting a fly in it.  That is what I mean when I say that
London gives me a pain.
     I was very glad to be back in Boleskine.  I had no particular plans; I
had really settled down.  If I had a tendency at all, it was to play little
practical jokes.  They were the outcome of my happiness.  I put up a
signboard in a field across the road:
     This way to the Kooloomooloomavlock (does not bite), in the hope that
the wayfarer might amuse my by going to look for it.  As a matter of fact,
this animal created the greatest terror in the neighbourhood, the more so
that it remained invisible.  After my departure in 1905, the hotel

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keeper of Foyers determined to abate the nuisance and took his gun and
tried to stalk it.  He was observed from the hill by my ghillie and piper,
Hugh gillies, the best servant I ever had in Europe, advancing by short
rushes and in every way comporting himself as the military necessities of
the situation required.  "She may no bite," quoth Gillies, "but a'm
thinking she pu's legs."
     My activities as a publisher were in themselves a sort of practical
joke.  It amused me to bewilder and shock people.  I took nothing seriously
except my occult life at any time and that was at present more or less in
abeyance.  I wrote one or two poems at this time, notably "Rosa Inferni",
before Rose joined me in St. Moritz, and somehow or other I had written the
fourth book of "Orpheus" part of which is inspired by my experience in Egypt.
I published them at once.  They had never satisfied me; the form was
theoretically impossible.  On the other hand, the lyrics and some of the
dramatic dialogue are as good as anything in my work.  I felt that one part
of my life was drawing to a close.  I made a clean sweep of my literary
dustbin.  I had its contents carted away and dumped on the public.  I felt
myself to be on the brink of a new birth and in "Gargoyles" will be found the
first fruits of that new life.
     But at this particular time I was much too happy to create.  Creation
is the effect of physiological dissatisfaction.  That is why it comes as a
relief.  The creation of the universe, love, sea-sickness, are all of the
same order of phenomena.  I was at this time like the Eternal, lapped in
calm bliss and enjoying his own perfection.  But to such states there
always arrives a period when discomfort arises from the accumulation of the
secretions produced by the metabolism of one's elements.  Presently one
become conscious of the need to sneeze or what not, and in course of time
one has to sneeze.
     It is a very curious thing, by the way, that the average man accepts
quite calmly the heresies of the average thinker with perfect equanimity.
Bernard Shaw's attacks of religion and morality are taken as a matter of
course.  But when people like Ibsen, Nietzsche and myself say the same
things, we are held up to popular execration.
     There was no snake in my Eden; the impulse which drove me out took the
positive form of Opportunity.  From time to time, various friends had
visited us: Gerald Kelly and his mother, Eckenstein, and so on, and a quite
insignificant creature named Lieutenant-Colonel Gormley, who was destined
to play a curious part in my life.  He was a medical soldier and had spend
countless years in India, Burma and South Africa without acquiring a single
fact of interest.  He was incapable of appreciating so much as a funny
story, even an improper one if there were any touch of wit in it.  But if
anyone introduced an obscene word into the conversation on any pretext
soever, he would rock with laughter and continue to titter for an
indefinite period.

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     He was the first masochist I had ever met; in fact I have only met one
other, and it is not for me to decide which was the filthier fool.  Gormley
claimed to have been flagellated by over two thousand women.  I rather
suspect him of vaingloriousness: it seems a very large number.  He was in
love with my wife, chiefly because she treated him with such disgust and
contempt.  He had proposed to her several times a week, even before her
first marriage, and he saw no reason why he should abandon this habit
merely on account of Major Skerrett and myself.  I don't know why I
tolerated him; I don't know why anyone tolerated him.  Perhaps it was the
subconscious feeling that one cannot be unkind to anything so pitiable.
     On April 27th, the good Tartarin, who had published a book (in the
Swiss language) on our expedition to Chogo Ri, illustrated with many
admirable photographs but not distinguished by literary quality or accuracy
(in many respects), and had lectured in Paris and other capitals on Chogo
Ri, dropped in.  I was heartily glad to see him.  He was the same cheerful
ass as ever, but he had got a bit of a swelled head and was extremely
annoyed with me for not leading him instantly to stalk the sinister stag,
to grapple with the grievous grouse, and to set my ferrets on the fearful
pheasant.  He could not understand the game laws.  Well, I'm a poet; I
determined to create sport since it id not exist.  More, it should be
unique.
     I opened the campaign as follows.  Tartarin knew the origin of the
wild buffalo of Burma.  When the British destroyed the villages, their
cattle escaped the bayonet and starvation by taking to the jungle, where
they had become practically a new species.  After the '45 the British had
pursued the same policy of extermination --- I mean pacification --- in the
Highlands, and I thought it plausible to invent a wild sheep on the analogy
of the wild buffalo.  And more, the beast should be already famous.  I
described its rarity, its shyness, its ferocity, etc., etc. --- "You have
doubtless heard of it," I ended; "it is called the haggis."  My '52
Johannesburg completed that part of the "come-on".  Tartarin dreamt all
night of scaling a lonely and precipitous pinnacle and dragging a lordly
haggis from his lair.  For my part, like Judas in the famous story of the
Sepher Toldoth Jeschu, I did not dream at all: I did better!
     Two mornings later, Hugh Gillies, with disordered dress and wild eyes,
came rushing into the billiard room after breakfast.  He exploded
breathlessly, "There's a haggis on the hill, my lord!"
     We dropped our cues and dashed to the gun case.  Trusting to my skill,
I contented myself with the .577 Double Express, and gave Tartarin the
principal weapon of my battery, a 10-bore Paradox, with steel-core bullets.
It is a reliable weapon, it will bring an elephant up short with a mere
shock, even if he is not hit in a vital part.  With such an arm, my friend
could advance fearlessly against the most formidable haggis in the
Highlands.

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     Not a moment was to be lost.  Gillies, followed by the doctor, myself
and my wife, tiptoed, crouching low, out of the front door and stalked the
fearsome beast across the Italian garden.
     The icy rain chilled us to the bone before we reached the edge of the
artificial trout lake.  I insisted on wading through this -- up to the
neck, guns held high --- on the ground that we should thus throw the haggis
off our scent!
     We emerged dripping and proceeded to climb the hill on all fours.
Every time anyone breathed, we all stopped and lay low for several minutes.
It was a chilly performance, but it was worth it!  Tartarin soon reached
the point where every bent twig looked to him like one of the horns of our
haggis.  I crawled and dripped and choked back my laughter.  The idiocy of
the whole adventure was intensified by the physical discomfort and the
impossibility of relieving one's feelings.  That interminable crawl!  The
rain never let up for a single second; and the wind came in gusts wilder
and more hitter with every yard of ascent.  I explained to Tartarin that if
it should shift a few degrees, the haggis would infallibly get our scent
and be off.  I implored him to camouflage his posteriors, which arose in
front for my balaclava, heaving like the hump of a dying camel.  The
resulting wiggles would have driven Isidora Duncan to despair; the poor man
was indeed acutely conscious that, anatomically, he had not been
constructed with the main idea of escaping notice.
     However, after an hour and a half, we reached the top of the hill,
three hundred feet above the house, without hearing that hideous scream-
whistle of alarm by which (so I had been careful to explain) the haggis
announces that he has detected the presence of an alien enemy.
     Breathlessly, we crawled towards the hollow space of grassy and
heathery knolls that lay behind the huge rock buttress that towers above
the garden and the lake, that space whose richness had tempted our
distinguished visitor to approach so near to human habitation.
     The mist drove wildly and fiercely across the hillside towards us.  It
magnified every object to an enormous size, the more impressively that the
background was wholly blotted out.  Suddenly Gilles rolled stealthily over
to the right, his finger pointed tremulously to where, amid the unfurling
wreaths of greyness, stood ...
     Tartarin brought forward the 10-bore with infinite precision.  The
haggis loomed gargantuan in the mist; it was barely fifty yards away.  Even
I had somehow half hypnotized myself into a sort of perverse excitement.  I
could have sworn the brute was the size of a bear.
     Guillarmod pressed both triggers.  He had made no mistake.  Both
bullets struck and expanded; he had blown completely away the entire rear
section of Farmer McNab's prize ram.

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     We rushed forward, cheering frantically.  Gillies had to be first in
at the death; the supply of oats with which he had induced our latest
purchase to feed in that spot all the morning without moving, might, if
observed, have detracted from the uncanny glory of that romantic scene.
     But next day at dinner, when we ate that haggis, the general hilarity
passed unchallenged.  The atmosphere had become wholly Homeric; there was
no reason why the wildest glee should seem out of place.
     Tartarin sent the ram's head to be stuffed and mounted; a suitable
inscription was to be engraved upon a plate of massive gold.  For had not
the gallant Swiss vindicated their race once more?  Would not the "Gazette"
"de Lausanne" literally foam at the mouth with the recital of so doughty an
exploit?
     And so the contented Tartarin developed his plans for renewing the
attack upon the Himalayas.  Eckenstein had been approached, but for one
reason or another had refused.  I should have preferred it vastly if he had
accepted; but I was a keen as ever to capture the only world's record which
he and I did not, severally or jointly, hold; that of having reached a
higher point on mountains than any other climbers.  (This record was held
either by Graham on Kebru --- a doubtful case --- or by Matthias
Zurbriggen, the guide whom Eckenstein had trained to mountaincraft, on
Aconcagua.)
     Mindful, however, of Tartarin's misadventure in 1902, I made the
strictest conditions before agreeing to join the new expedition.  A
document was drawn up and signed by which I should be acknowledged leader
of the party.  I was to be obeyed implicitly in all matters relating to the
actual conduct of the expedition on the mountain.  It was a deliberate
breach of this agreement which caused directly its failure and the disaster
which disgraced it.










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                              51


     Expedition 1905, au Kangchenjunga.
          Accord.
     Le Dr. J. Jacot Guillarmod & ses trois amis fournissent une somme de
     quinze mille francs.
     Monsieur Aleister Crowley & un ami fourniront … deux une somme de
     5,000 franks (cinq mille).
     Pour cette dermiŠre contribution, le Dr. J. Jacot Guillarmod s'engage
     … fournir l'approvisionnement & le transport du moment du d‚part de
     Darjeeling jusqu'au retour … Darjeeling.
     L'exp‚dition sera enterprise dans les meilleures conditions possibles,
     vu la nature du pays … traverser.
     Le but de l'exp‚dition sera l'ascension du Kangchenjunga (28,150
     feet).
     On essayera d'abord par le glacier de Yalung.
     On partira de Darjeeling dans la seconde moiti‚ de juillet; on y
     reviendra en octobre au plus tard.
     Aleister Crowley partira pour Darjeeling aussit“t que possible, afin
     de faire tous les pr‚paratifs & arrangements n‚cessaires.
     On respectera soigneusement les pr‚jug‚s & les croyances indigŠnes &
     on ne s'immiscera pas dans leurs maniŠres de vivre.
     On n'achŠtera rien sans l'assentiment dy Dr. J. Jacot G. ou de A.
     Crowley.
     On s'engage … n'avoir aucune relation directe ou indirecte avec les
     femmes, indigŠnes ou ‚trangŠres, qu'on peut ‚viter.
     Le Dr. J. Jacot G. est seul & suprˆme juge des questions d'hygiŠne ou
     de sant‚ de la caravane.
     Aleister Crowley est seul & suprˆme juge des questions se rapportant
     exclusivement … l'alpinisme & aux montagnes.
     Les questions de route & dy personnel des caravanes seront d‚cid‚es
     par lui seul.  Ses camarades se conformeront … ses r‚solutions.
     Personne ne sera oblig‚ de risquer sa vie, … cause du froid, du manque
     de nourriture, d'ascension p‚rilleuse, pouvant entraŒner une chute.
     Toute discussion relative … cet accord doit ˆtre soumise …
     l'arbitrage; on ne peut invoquer de loi ou de jugement d'homme de loi.
     Les clauses de cet accord lient tous les membres de l'exp‚dition par
     leur honneur.                                 Aleister Crowley
         Dr. J. Jacot Guillarmod                            Ch. Reymond
         A. C. R. de Righi                              Alexis A. Pache


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     There was no time to spare, if we were to attack Kanchenjunga this
summer.  It was arranged that the doctor was to get together the necessary
provisions and equipment at once in Europe, while I went direct to
Darjeeling to make arrangements with the government about transport and
such communications as the heliograph, by which means we intended to signal
our progress to observers on Signal Hill, above the station, to collect
some of our old Kashmir shikaris if possible, to learn a little Nepali, and
perhaps to enlist the assistance of enterprising individuals on the spot.
     I left for London on May 6th and made such preparations with regard to
my personal equipment as seemed desirable, and on May 12th left England for
the East by the P & O S.S. "Marmora."  Eckenstein maintained constantly that
the adventure was foolhardy; that, for his own part, he would never consent
to go on a mountain again with Jacot Duillarmod; and that, in one way or
another, his vanity, inexperience, fatuity and folly were certain to land
us in disaster.  I liked Tartarin so well, personally, that I unconsciously
minimized his imbecility; and I was still much too young to realize how
much mischief may be done indirectly be the mere presence of such a man,
despite every precaution that prudence can suggest and all the supervision
that caution can recommend.  So I went into it --- and realize only of late
how lucky I was to come out of it all!
    It was part of my policy with regard to physical training to make the
whole journey by sea.  I fed up and lounged about and told stories till the
twenty-third, when I arrived in Cairo.  The city is abandoned by tourists
by this time of the year on account of some superstition about the climate;
but to me Cairo at the end of May was more pleasant that I had ever known
it.  I joined the P & O on the thirty-first.  It was certainly hot in the
Red Sea, but I remember with intense pleasure of wonder a single incident.
Most of the passengers, including myself, slept on deck.  I was awakened
one morning before dawn by a dazzling ray of blue, as if a searchlight had
been suddenly turned on me.  The planet Jupiter had risen.  Curiously
enough an exactly parallel incident had taken place when I passed through
the Red Sea from Chogo Ri, but on that occasion it was a crimson glare and
the planet was Mars.

          Blue Mushtari strove with red Mirrikh
          which should be the master of the night,

as I wrote a few months later.  The sensation was unfeignedly one of alarm
which melted to wonder and rapture.  Many years later I was indeed
frightened for more than a moment of surprise by a quite normal celestial
phenomenon.  I was walking through unfrequented parts of Spain with a
disciple.  We were on a lonely road and night had fallen heavy and black.
Suddenly a wedge of flaming scarlet stabbed my eyes.  It increased rapidly

{412}





















in size and (perhaps therefore) seemed to be approaching us with frightful
velocity.  I remember to this hour my startled halt and the fierce gaze I
fixed upon the enemy.  I remember steeling myself to meet annihilation.
But it was merely the full moon, rising through a gap in the mountains.
     I reached Bombay on June 9th.  It was my first experience of the low
country of India in the hot season. I did not find it unbearable and I
would go back and live a month for the sake of just one mango.  The mango
is a very strangely sensitive fruit.  The perfect flavour is the private
property of a very limited district, as in the case of champagne.  The
mangoes of Bengal are as inferior to those of Bombay as second-rate brands
of "boy" to the best vintages of Rheims.  Those of Ceylon are like Asti
Spumante.
     I left Bombay the same day at half-past eleven.  My first act was to
go into the bathroom with which the best Indian trains are furnished and
turn on the shower.  Owing to the confined space, I was unable to beat the
world's record for combined high and long jump!  The carriage had been
standing on a siding in the sun that the tank was full of scalding water.
The worst of the journey was the smuts from the engine.  I reached Calcutta
at four o'clock in the morning of the eleventh and had breakfast and dinner
with my old friend Thornton.  The next day I left for Darjeeling.  It is
certainly one of the most impressive experiences that a railway can afford.
One begins by jogging dully across the acrid plains of Bengal and then at
Sara Ghat one finds oneself suddenly on the bank of the Ganges.  I had seen
the river before, higher up, and it is not particularly exciting, but here
it flowed gigantically across a vast desolation.  The time was sunset, the
turbid water glowed with angry reds and oranges.  There was an evil coppery
sheen upon its waveless turmoil.  Its breadth possessed a horror of its
own; it was like a river of hell.  Far away it reached to the right and
left.  There was nothing to break the horizon.  I gave the desolate effect
of ocean, but the boundlessness of the open sea suggests liberty.  This
river had told of barrenness and bitter bondage.  The windless Ganges stank
of putrefaction.  It was not even the stench of rotting vegetation.  It
seemed as if it were the earth itself which was decaying.  A more fantastic
and more frightful sight I have never seen.  We crossed this tartarean
river in a steamer and the actual breadth may be estimated from the fact
that dinner is served on board.  It was a bad dinner, too; it completed the
hellishness of the scene.
     One lands.  The eternal funeral march of the train is resumed.  The
heat of the night is stifling.  The waning moon --- when laggard she looms
up above the rim of the planet --- is almost as impotent as the stars to
pierce the sultry haze of dust which chokes one.  The coolest place on
one's pillow is whereone's head has cooled it.  One tosses in blind
torment.  There is no question of seeking relief; one has an instinct that
nothing will do any good.  Perhaps one drops off to sleep for a few
moments, and those, however

{422}



















few they be, are filled with aeons of delirious and demoniac dreams of
suffocation dipped in despair.
     Then suddenly comes dawn.  The slow train stutters and stops.  One is
still an insect on the infernal plain, but there is a touch of coolness in
the air which is not wholly the chill of death.  The sticky sweat on one's
body begins to evaporate and one's spirit to revive.  There is a call to
Chota Hazri.  One steps out of the carriage.  Good God!
     Not many miles away across the level to the east rise thickly wooded
slopes, a confused tangle both of hills (as it seems) and of trees, and
behind them again, still higher heights of misty purple and green.  And
then --- good God!  Is it a mirage?  Is it a phantom of hope created by
courage from the chaos of nightmare?  For there, above the highest hills,
at an angle for which even one's experience of Chogo Ri has not prepared
me, there stands the mass of Kangchenjunga, faint rose, faint blue, clear
white, in the dawn.
     On reaching the foot of the hills, one transfers to a toy railway,
which climbs the six thousand odd feet to Darjeeling by means of
complicated curves and even loops.  One ascends rapidly; the view
constantly changes; one begins to appreciate the geology of the country as
a whole.  In the foreground the tropical vegetation is superbly thick and
rich.  One is so relieved by the change to cool shade and a suggestion of
moisture that it comes as a shock to remember that this is the Teri, one of
the most deadly fever districts in the world.  By lunchtime the character
of the vegetation is already markedly altered.  The heavy tangle of the low
country begins to give place to mountain sprightliness, but also the view
tends to disappear altogether.  One enters the region of almost eternal
mist.  The day is warm; and yet one is chilled to the bone.  One is glad to
come out on to an exposed ridge at Ghum and find the train begins to go
down hill.  It was the sign of the nearness of Darjeeling.  I got off the
train.  With unfeigned satisfaction, I observed immediately that the
current legends about the amazing powers of the coolies were true.  The
principal item of my baggage was a full-sized wardrobe trunk, but its
contents were not mostly air, as usual with the American variety of this
device.  It contained comparatively few clothes; boots, axes, rifles,
revolvers, scientific instruments and books made up the tale.  I do not
know how much it weighed, because the baggage clerk at Calcutta had asked
me to bribe him with a rupee to declare it below the free allowance; but I
should have been very sorry to have to do more than set it up on end
unaided.  A young girl coolie took it on her back, as I might have done a
rucksack, and carried it at a good steady pace up the steep narrow paths to
the Woodlands Hotel.  I no longer disbelieved the story that a woman had
once carried a full-sized upright piano all the way to Darjeeling from
Siliguri on the plains.
     Darjeeling is a standing or rather steaming example of official
ineptitude.

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Sir Joseph Hooker, one of the few men of brains who have explored these
parts, made an extended survey of the district and recommended Chumbi as a
hill station.  "Oh well," they say, "Darjeeling is forty miles nearer than
Chumbi.  It will do rather better."  So Darjeeling it was.  The difference
happens to be that Chumbi has a rainfall of some forty inches a year;
Darjeeling some two hundred odd.  The town is perched on so steep a ridge
that there is practically no level road anywhere and one gets from one
house to another by staircases as steep as ladders.
     The whole town stinks of mildew.  One's room is covered with mildew
afresh every morning.
     India being the last hope of the unmarriageable shabby-genteel,
Darjeeling is lousy with young ladies whose only idea of getting a husband
is to practise the piano.  In such a climate it is of course impossible to
keep a piano in tune for five minutes, even if one could get it into that
condition.  The food itself is as mildewed as the maidens.  The hotels
extort outrageous rates which they attempt to justify by describing the
meals in bad French.  To be reminded of Paillard is adding insult to
injury, for what the dishes are made of I never did discover.  Almost the
whole time I was there I was suffering from sore throat, arthritis, every
plague that pertains to chronic soddenness.  Do I like Darjeeling?  I do
not!
     On the other hand, I hound the heaven-born and the army as full of
cordiality and comradeship as ever.  As luck would have it, a new
Worshipful Master was to be installed at the Lodge of Freemasons, so I went
to the Jadugar-Khana and received a most brotherly welcome to the ceremony
and banquet.  There I met Sir Andrew Fraser, the lieutenant-governor, the
commissioner, the deputy-commmissioner, the Maharaja of Kuch Behar and all
sorts of delightful people.  Everyone was only too willing to help in every
way.
     I wanted to start for the mountain as early in the season as possible.
We had reliable information as to what the weather on the higher peaks was
likely to be.  We had no Zojila to cross, no forty marches to the foot of
the peak but twelve or fifteen at the outside.  If we found it continuously
bad, one could retreat into the valley and recuperate almost as one can in
the Alps, for Tsetam is only about twelve thousand feet.
     I had reconnoitered Kangchenjunga from England, thanks to the
admirable photographs of every side of the mountain taken by Signor
Vittorio Sella, who accompanied some man named Freshfield in a sort of old-
world tour around the mountain.  I had also a map by Professor Garwood, the
only trouble with which was that, not having been up the Yalung glacier
himself, he had had to fill in the details from what he himself calls the
unintelligible hieroglyphics of a native surveyor, who had not been there
either.

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     It did not matter; but I was very much puzzled by the appearance of a
peak where no peak should have been, according to the map.
     The bandobast for this expedition was very different to that necessary
for Chogo Ri, if one takes Darjeeling as the analogy to Srinigar, for there
are no villages and supplies of men and food to be had anywhere on the way.
I had to send on eight thousand pounds of food for the coolies to a depot
as near the Yalung glacier as possible.  The government transport officer,
Major White, very kindly undertook to oversee this part of the transport
and I left it entirely in his hands.  Unfortunately, things did not go as
well as could be desired.  The coolies in this part of India compare very
unfavourably with the Baltis and the Kashmiris.  They are Tibetan Buddhists
with an elaborate priestcraft and system of atonement which persuaded early
Jesuit travellers that Satan had perpetrated --- in advance! --- a
blasphemous parody on Christianity; for they found only trivial, formal
distinctions between the religions of Lhasa and Rome.  They are therefore
accessible to emotion and acquire a sentimental devotion to people for whom
they take a fancy.  But they have no notion of self-respect, no loyalty, no
honesty and no courage.  Many of Major White's men deserted, either dumping
their loads anywhere on the way or stealing them; and there was no means of
controlling their actions.  I prepared to expect trouble and was very glad
that I had sent to Kashmir for three of our best men of 1902 --- Salama,
Subhana and Ramzana.
     My throat gave me such trouble that I decided to go to Calcutta for a
few days --- from July 13th to 20th.  I had in any case to purchase a
number of additional stores, as Guillarmod had "economized".  The bandobast
went on in charge of the manager of the Drum Druid Hotel, to which I had
moved shortly after my arrival.  He was an Italian named Righi.  He offered
to join the expedition as transport officer and I, relying on his knowledge
of the language and the natives, thought it best to accept him, though his
character was mean and suspicious and his sense of inferiority to white men
manifested itself as a mixture of servility and insolence to them and of
swaggering and bullying to the natives.  These traits did not seem so
important in Darjeeling, but I must blame myself for not foreseeing that
his pin brain would entirely give way as soon as he got out of the world of
waiters.
     I was quite happy about the mountain.  On July 9th, only twenty-six
days after my arrival in Darjeeling, the rain stopped for a few minutes and
I was able to get a good view of the mountain through my glasses.  It
entirely confirmed my theoretical conclusions; the highest peak was almost
certainly easy to reach from the col to the west of it, and there could be
no doubt that it was an easy walk up to that col by a couloir of sorts
which I called Jacob's Rake (a "portmanteau" of Jacob's ladder and Lord's
rake).  The word couloir does not quite describe it; the word "rake" does,
but I can't define rake.  Anyone who wants to know what I mean must go to
Cumberland.

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The foot of this rake is in a broad snow basin and the only possible
question was whether that snow basin was reachable from the Yalung glacier.
I have told already of my ability to describe accurately parts of a
mountain which I cannot see.  I judged the snow basin accessible.  My
clairvoyance turned out to be exactly correct.
     But more promising even that the feasibility of the route was the
appearance of the mountain.  Despite the perpetual bad weather at
Darjeeling, which made me feel absolutely hopeless, there was no new snow
at all on the mountain.  Only forty-five miles away, it had been continuous
fine weather.  I went down to Calcutta with a light heart.  I had had good
news too from Tartarin.  He had persuaded a Swiss army officer, Alexis
Pache, to join us.  The other man of the party was named Remond, who had
had a fair amount of guideless experience on the Alps.
     On the fifteenth I had a telegram from the doctor that he had been
shipwrecked in the Red Sea.  I might have known it!  The three Swiss
arrived on July 31st.  I had got everything into such a forward state of
preparation that we were able to start of August 8th.  There was nothing to
be done but to pack the baggage which the doctor seemed to have brought
out, in the units which I had got ready for him.  The doctor seemed to be
suffering from ill-health from various trifling causes.  He seemed a shade
irritable and fussy.  I suspect the cause was partly physical.  His sense
of his own importance was hurting him.  Reymond I liked well enough; a
quiet if rather dour man, who seemed to have a steady mind and common
sense.  But Pache won my heat from the moment I met him --- a simple,
unaffected, unassuming gentleman.  He was perfectly aware of his own
inexperience on mountains, and therefore in a state to acquire information
by the use of his eyes rather than of his ears.
     Everything went off without a hitch, except the affair of the depot.
We learnt on August 6th that the coolies had dumped the food at Chabanjong,
scarce eighteen miles north-west of Darjeeling, instead of at Jongri,
thirty miles due north.  This fact, among others, led to my deciding to
approach Kangchenjunga by way of the ridge which leads from Ghum
practically directly to the head of a side valley through which a tributary
of the Yalung Chu descends from theKang La.
     Our party consisted of five Europeans, three Kashmiris, the sirdar of
the coolies, six personal servants and seventy-nine regular coolies.  We
left Darjeeling at ten sixteen on Tuesday, August 8th.  The expedition had
begun.




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                              52


     One can certainly reach the neighbourhood of Khangchenjunga with
delightful comfort.  Though the mountain is only forty-five miles from
Darjeeling, as the Crow flies, the way is round about.  The stages from
Ghum are Jorpakri 8 1/2, Tongly 18 1/2, Sandakphu 33, Falut 45, Chabanjong
51.  Up to this point there is an excellent riding path, while the first
four stages have well-furnished dak baghlas.
     Unpleasant features of the journey are two: one, the rain, and the
other the leeches.  I thought I knew a bit about rain --- I didn't.  At
Akyab one puts one's head under water in the hope of getting out of the
wet; at Darjeeling one's head is under water all the time.  But on that
ghastly ridge, I met a quality and quantity of bat weather that I had never
dreamt of in my wildest nightmares.  What follows sounds exaggerated.  On
getting into a dak baghla and standing stripped in front of a roaring fire,
one expects to get dry.  But no! the dampness seems to be metaphysical
rather than physical.  The mere removal of the manifestations of the
elements of water do not leave one dry.  But one used to obtain a sort of
approximation to dryness by dint of fires; and of course we were provided
with waterproofs specially constructed for that abominable climate.  One
morning I timed myself; after taking every precaution, it was eight and one
half minutes from the door of the baghla before I was dripping wet.  When I
say "dripping wet", I mean that the water was coursing freely inside my
clothes.  In most parts of the world rain falls, but on that accursed ridge
it rises.  It is blown up in sheets from the valley.  It splashes on the
rocks so as to give the effect of waterfalls upside down.
     On the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth, there were short spells
of respite; otherwise, from the eighth to the twentieth it never slackened
and outside the dak baghlas I was not dry, even partially, for a single
second.
     The leeches of the district are a most peculiar tribe.  For some
reason, they can only live within a very well-defined belt.  Thus, I never
saw a leech at Darjeeling, while at Lebong, some five hundred feet lower,
they are a pest.  The Terai is the haunt of some of the most tenacious of
animals, but the leech has cleared them out completely.  A single leech
will kill a pony.  It works its way up into the nostril and the pony simply
bleeds to death.  Hence the Anglo-Indian proverb.  "A jok's a jok
[Hindustani for leech] but a jok up your nose is no jok."
     I witnessed a remarkable sight on the road to Chabanjong, which was
here

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a "paka rasta" (that is, a road made by engineers as opposed to "kacha rasta,"
a track made by habit or at most by very primitive methods) wide enough for
carts to pass.  I had squatted near the middle of the road as being the
least damp and leech-infested spot available and got a pipe going by
keeping the bowl under my waterproof.  I lazily watched a leech wriggling
up a blade of tall grass about fifteen inches high and smiled superiorily
at its fatuity --- though when I come to think of it, my own expedition was
morally parallel; but the leech was not such a fool as I thought.  Arrived
at the top, it began to set the stalk swinging to and fro; after a few
seconds it suddenly let go and flew clean across the road.  The
intelligence of and ingenuity of the creature struck me as astonishing.
(Legless animals are practically helpless on open ground.  One can walk up
to a king cobra on a smooth road and set one's heel on its head, as
prophesied in Genesis, without much danger of being struck, and though it
sees you coming, it is quite unable to escape.  But give the same snake a
little grass to flagellate and the eye can hardly follow its motion.  It
goes like a snipe.)
     Coming back over the same ridge, I was on an open hillside running
fast.  It was raining downwards instead of upwards for once, and that but
slightly.  I heard a little noise, as if something had fallen on my hat,
and took no notice.  A few moments later I found that my hand was wet with
blood, running fast, and looking down I saw a leech on the back of it.  How
it managed to fall from the sky I don't know.  I have seen leeches up to
seven inches long; and there seems hardly any limit to the amount of blood
they can assimilate.  I heard of a gorged leech weighing nearly two pounds
and I believe it without effort.
     Another strange sight in these parts is the sheep.  Tartarin, still
proud of his haggis, invented wonderful theories to explain the fact that
they are muzzled.  However, they are not "mountons enrag‚s";  the muzzle is
to prevent them from poisoning themselves with wild aconite.
     The scenery along the while of his ridge is extraordinarily grand, so
far as the mist permits one to see anything.  Some of the Himalayan trees
are superb.  But the prevailing vegetation is the rhododendron, a plant
which has little in common with its English cousin.  It grows to a height
of fifteen feet or more and the stems are often as thick as a man's thigh.
It grows in unbroken forests and the worst Mexican chaparral I ever saw was
not worse to have to cut one's way through.
     At Chabanjong the road stops and I sent back my horse.  Thence a
shepherd's track leads along the ridge.  One the whole it was very good
walking.
     We had already found trouble with our own coolies.  To begin with, the
police had caught me up atJorpakri and arrested one of them for some petty
offence --- he joined us for more reasons than one.  Six of the men
deserted in the early part of the march.  I was a small percentage and they
had evidently

{428}



















never had any intention of earning their advances.  Later, when I had to go
on ahead, five men deserted Pache, whom I had to leave in charge.  They
were probably scared by superstitious fears.  Pache could not talk to them
and did not know how to encourage them.
     After leaving Chabanjong it was impossible to tell exactly where one
was on the ridge.  The "paros" have names, but I could never discover that
they applied to anything; it was all rain and rhododendra.  There is a
place called Nego Cave which I hoped was a cave where I could shelter from
the rain for a few hours, but nobody seemed to know here it was and I never
found out.  I had actually to rest a day in this abominable place, as the
official permit for our party to enter Nepal had not arrived; but it did so
during the day and one the eighteenth came a very long march of something
like eight hours of actual going.  During the latter part of the march the
path dips suddenly and one descends some three thousand feet into a valley.
     Well do I remember this camp Gamotang!  Apart from the flora and
fauna, the last two days might have been spent on the Welsh mountains, but
the descent to Gamotang was like stepping into fairyland.  There are
certain places --- Sonamarg in Kashmir is one of them --- which possess the
quality of soft brilliance quite unearthly.  There is really nothing to
distinguish them from a hundred other spots in the neightbourhood, yet they
stand out; as a genius does from a hundred other men in evening dress.  I
find these phenomena quite as real as any others and I feel impelled to
seek an explanation.
     Assuming the existence of inhabitants imperceptible by our grosser
senses, the problem presents no difficulty.  One of a row of similar houses
is often quite different from its neightours, perhaps on account of the
loving care and pride of its chatelaine.  When I see an analogous
phenomenon in scenery, I cannot blame myself if a similar explanation comes
to my mind.
     The weather was already noticeably better than at Darjeeling.  It did
not begin to rain till eight or ten in the morning every day.
     The partial failure of the bandobast kept us a day atGamotang.  There
was in any case no great hurry.  I was glad of every opportunity to acquire
the affection of the men.  I was careful not to overwork them.  I gave a
prize to the first three men to come into camp every day and those who had
come in first three times had their pay permanently raised.  I made friends
with them, too, by sitting with them round the camp fire and exchanging
songs and stories.  On the other hand, I made it clear that I would
tolerate no nonsense.  They responded for the most part very well, I never
had any trouble in all my wanderings with natives, servants, dogs and
women.  The secret is that I am really unconscious of superiority and treat
all alike with absolute respect and affection; at the same time I maintain
the practical relations between myself and others very strictly indeed.
     It is the fable of the belly and the members.  It is absurd for one
speck of

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protoplasm to insist on its social superiority to another speck, but
equally absurd for one cell to want to do the work of another.  There is
another point, admirably stated by Wilkie Colins.  Count Fosco says that
the way to manage women is "never to accept a provocation from a woman's
hands.  It holds with animals, it holds with children and it holds with
women, who are nothing but children grown up.  Quiet resolution is the one
quality the animals, the children and the women all fail in.  If then can
once shake this superior quality in their master, they get the better of
HIM.  If they can never succeed in disturbing it, he gets the better of
THEM."
     I make it an absolute rule to be imperturbable, to impress people with
the idea that it is impossible to avoid doing what I have done.  I never
try to arouse enthusiasm.  I never bribe, I never threaten, but I identify
my purpose with destiny and I administer reward and punishment unsparingly
and impersonally.
     The ciikues began to be very fond of me, not only because of my good
comradeship an my cheerful calm and confidence, but because they were
subconsciously relieved by my conduct from their personal demons of fear,
jealousy, desire and the like.  They became unconsciously aware that they
were parts of a machine.  As long as they did their duty, there was
absolutely nothing to worry about.  Most people suffer all their lives from
subconscious irritation; due to what the Hindus call Ahamkara, the ego-
making faculty.  The idea of self is a continual torment and though I was
still far from having got rid of this idea completely.  I was pretty free
of it in practice in matters where my responsibility was extensive.  I had
begun to understand how to work "without lust of result".
     Unfortunately, Tartarin and Righi were undoing my web as fast as I
wove it.  Righi was a low-class Italian, who ran his hotel by hectoring the
men under him.  Finding himself for the first time in his life in a
position of real responsibility, and without the background of an external
authority to which he could appeal to enforce his orders, he was utterly at
sea.  On one occasion he actually threatened a disobedient coolie with his
kukri and revolver, and the man, knowing he would not dare to use them,
laughed in his face.  The natives despised him as a weak man, which is the
worst thing that can befall anyone that has anything to do with them.
     Tartarin too, though cheerful and genial, had forgotten the lesson of
1902.  He was fussy and helpless.  On one occasion he actually tried to
bribe a man with boots and claws to do his ordinary duty.  As long as I was
with the main body, these things didn't matter.  Nobody dared to disobey
the Bara Sahib.  A moment's hesitation in complying with any order of mine
and they saw a look in my eyes which removed the inhibition.  They knew
that I would not scold or wheedle, but had a strong suspicion that I might
strike a man dead without warning; at the same time they knew that I would
never give an

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unreasonable order and that my active sympathy with the slightest
discomfort of anyone of them was as quick as my insight to detect and deal
with malingering or any other attempt to pull my leg.
     From Gamotang one has to climb to the Chumbab La --- about four hours'
march.  Then one skirts the slopes of the Kang La and descends to the
branch valley of the Yalung Chu.  I found a great block of quartz three and
one half hours beyond the pass and pitched camp.  The doctor arrived late
--- eight thirty.  He had had some trouble with the coolies, but they were
safely camped some short distance above.
     The next day was fearfully wet.  There is another little pass to
cross, and hour beyond the quartz block; two and a half hours more took me
down the valley to a camp near Tseram, which is a group of huts on the main
stream a couple of miles below the snout of the Yalung glacier.  I avoided
camping in Teseram itself, on the general principle of having nothing to do
with natives.  The Dewan of Nepal was sending an officer to superintend our
journey.  I  should perhaps have mentioned before that England has a
special treaty with Nepal, one of its terms to the effect that no
foreigners are to enter the dewan's dominions.  He knew that the most
harmless of Europeans is the herald of disaster to any independent country.
Where the white man sets his foot, the grass of freedom and the flower of
good faith are trampled into the mire of vice and commercialism.
     But in the present instance our route touched only this one tiny
outlying hamlet of Tseram and permission had been obtained without
difficulty for us to pass.  At the same time, the dewan was going to have a
man on the spot to see that we did not maltreat and corrupt the natives as
we have done in every other part of the globe in which our impulses of
greed and tyranny have seen a possibility of satisfaction.
     I saw no reason for waiting for the arrival of the dewan's "guide"
and, leaving a man with a message for him, continued the advance.
     I took only a very small party and left Pache in command.  He was to
wait until the arrival of the main body of the coolies, while I went on the
glacier to reconnoitre.  I wanted to establish the main camp as high as
possible, but of course I did not know whether I might not have to retrace
my steps.  The glacier stream might prove uncrossable.  I would make sure
that the whole party could reach the glacier without difficulty.
     I left the camp at six a.m. on the twenty-first.  I was now in really
mountainous country.  The valley was gorgeously wild, it glowed with rich
bright grass and masses of marvellous flowers.  There was an admirable
track.  The day was fine and I had views of both Little and Big Kabru
(21,290 and 24,015 feet respectively) but Kangchenjunga itself was hidden
in clouds.  I have rarely enjoyed a mountain walk so thoroughly and my
heart was uplifted by the excellence of our prospects.

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     It sang within me.  I was already at fourteen or fifteen thousand
feet, less than a fortnight our from the base, in perfect physical
condition, not an ounce of my reserve of strength yet called upon; a
perfectly clear course to the peak in front of me, the mountain scarce five
miles away, the weather looking better all the time, and none of the
extremes of temperature which had been so frightful on Chogo Ri.  No sign
that wind was likely to give any trouble.  In short, not one dark spot upon
the horizon.
     Camp 2, though no place for a golf course, as the game is at present
played, possesses the great advantage of being a perfect Pisgah.  The
summit of Kangchenjunga is only two miles away and I am able to see almost
the whole of the debatable ground which my reconnaissance from above
Darjeeling had denied me.  I climbed to a short distance above the camp:
the last doubt disappeared.  The level glacier stretched less than a mile
away.  Thence rose a ridge covered by steep glacier except at its eastern
edge, where there was a patch of bare rock with scarcely any interruption
from ice.  This rock was cut away on its right by a terrific precipice,
sheer to the lower glacier, but there was no reason why anyone should fall
off.  The rocks were of the character --- easy slabs --- of those of the
Eiger above the little Scheideck, the precipice being on the right hand
instead of on the left.  The slabs ended in a level space of snow jutting
beyond the glacier above, and therefore safe from any possible avalanche.
The place would make an admirable camp.
     Thence, one could work a way to the west; and, avoiding a patch of
s‚racs, ascend steep slopes of ice (covered at present by snow) which led
directly to the great snow basin which lies, as one may say, in the embrace
of Kangchenjunga.  These slopes were the critical point of the passage.  It
intended to fix a long knotted rope at the top, if necessary, to serve as
hand-hold for the coolies, it being now certain that we could establish our
main camp at the foot of Jacob's Rake.  Certain, that is, bar the
interference of absolute perversity.
     The following day showed me that such perversity was only too likely
to put a spoke in the wheel.  The arrangement was that I was to find my way
to Camp 3, which I had already been able to choose through my glasses.  I
left Tartarin and Reymond in charge of the bulk of the coolies, having
pointed out to them the best way across the glacier.  It was more or less
intricate going compared with Piccadilly, but it was certainly less trouble
than an average march on the Baltoro.  My object in going ahead was merely
to make sure that Camp 3 was as favourable as it looked from a distance.
It was.  There was a broad level plateau of loose stones marked by a big
boulder, which I called Pioneer boulder, for a variety of reasons, all
referring ironically to "Pioneer Peak".  This plateau was perhaps seven
hundred to a thousand feet above the glacier.
     I must here remark that I cannot pretend to any accuracy about either

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heights or distances.  Tartarin was in charge of the surveying and I do not
know whether he took proper observations at all.  All I can say is that
Professor Garwood's map is seriously wrong in many important points.  I
could do little more than make shots at my position by dead reckoning.  I
settled down quite comfortably at Camp 3 and sent a man down to find the
main body and tell them it was all right, and they were to come up.  Most
unfortunately, it was misty.  I could not see what had happened.  And if I
had been able to, I might almost have doubted my eyes.  The coolies were
coming --- Oh ho! oh ho! --- in a long circular route round the head of the
glacier, for no reason at all.  The weather cleared towards evening and
there they were, within shouting distance, within three quarters of an
hour's easy going for the slowest men, up excellent slopes on firm rocky
ground.
     To my amazement, I saw the doctor preparing to pitch camp.  It was
inexplicable imbecility.  Shouts produced no effect and there was nothing
for it but for me to go down.  He had chosen a bivouac on bare ice, where
there was hardly sufficient level ground to pitch the tents, but it was too
late to pack up again, so I had to make the best of it.  I asked him the
reason for his extraordinary conduct.  He replied that there was a rumour
that I had broken my leg on a moraine.  This was as antecedently unlikely
as anything could possibly be; and anyhow he could see perfectly well with
his own eyes that I had done nothing of the sort; and thirdly, if I had
done it, all the more reason for coming to my assistance.  I began to think
there was something seriously wrong with the man.
     On the top of this, there was bad news from the rearguard.  Righi sent
up bitterly quarrelsome messages.  His antics had made all sots of trouble
with the coolies, who were at one time in open revolt.  Pache managed to
get them into good humour again.  He was a gentleman; he understood the
oriental mind instinctively.  He was, in fact, making extremely good.  As
soon as he saw that Righi was half insane with the fear that comes to
people of his class in the absence of a chattering heard of his fellows,
and in the presence of the grandeur of nature, he assumed moral charge of
him.  The difficulties with the rearguard disappeared immediately.
Unfortunately, I did not understand at the time what was happening, o I
should have gone down and sent Righi back to his kitchen.  Pache himself
did not realize his own importance and took it upon himself to come up.
The moment his back was turned, Righi became insane.
     Everyone had passed a most uncomfortable night at the absurd bivouac.
I decided to go no further than Camp 3 the next day.  Tartarin was
abosoutely astonished that the men which whom he had been having such
trouble behaved quite simply and naturally as soon as I was on the spot.
He claimed that they had positively refused to go further, but they picked
up their loads and strolled cheerfully up the slopes without so much as a
word of admonition.

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Not understanding the secret of my power, though he had seen it exercised
so often by Eckenstein and myself, he imagined that I must be terrorizing
the men by threats and beatings.  In point of fact, I never struck a man
during the entire expedition, save on one occasion to be described
presently.
     Camp 3 was extremely pleasant.  It afforded magnificent views in every
direction and one had one's choice of sun or shade.  I spent the day in
taking advantage of the amenities of the situation.  I took pains to fix up
an excellent shelter for the men by means of large tarpaulins, and saw to
their comfort in every way.  We had even the advantage of song, for the
camp was a haunt of small birds.  Its height cannot have been far short of
eighteen thousand feet.
     It was urgent that the march to Camp 4 should be started at the
earliest glimmer of light, for though the route lay almost entirely over
rock, there were a few short snow passages which would become dangerous
after sunrise, and the hanging glacier on our left might conceivably
discharge some of its superfluous snow across one or two points of the
route.  I explained these points carefully to the men, who were for the
most part quite intelligent enough to understand. Moreover, they were
already aware of the general principles, a number o them having already
travelled, if not on glaciers, at least on winter snow.  They were eager to
start; but Tartarin deliberately hindered them.  I had awakened at three
o'clock and got them off by six.  It had not been a cold night, none of the
men showed any signs of suffering or made any complaint, but the doctor
said that they ought to be allowed to warm themselves thoroughly in the sun
before starting.  He suggested that the march should begin at about eleven
o'clock.  These were the words of sheer insanity.  Even on Chogo Ri, where
the nights were really cold, no such nonsense had ever been suggested.
     I led at once on to the glacier.  There was no difficulty of any sort;
the snow being in excellent condition, it merely required a little scraping
and stamping.  But at the point where it becomes necessary to take the
rocks on the right so as not to be under a small patch of s‚racs, the slope
is in the direction the the tremendous precipice previously described.  It
was there that I gave an exhibition of glissading.  I do not think the men
would have been afraid at all if the excited shouts and gesticulations of
Reymond and the doctor had not demoralized them.  These celebrated climbers
were themselves actually afraid for their own skins.  And this, if you
please, on a slope down which I could glissade head first!  Having got the
men across, we proceeded up the rocky slopes.  I must confess that here I
had misjudged the difficulty.
     I had expected to find quite easy walking, but there were a few
passages where it amounted to scrambling from the point of view of a loaded
man.  I decided to arrange for a fixed rope as a measure of safety, it
being my plan to send the picked coolies up and down regularly to bring up
supplies as they

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were needed.  In the meantime, the men behaved magnificently, laughing and
joking and giving each other a helping hand whenever required.  I posted
the Kashmiris and the other personal servants at the "mauvais pas," but there
was no hint of any real danger.
     Camp 4 is at the top of this rocky slope on a level ridge, level
enough, but not a broad as I could have wished.  There was, however, a
certain amount of natural shelter afforded by rocks and I was able to
construct a fairly comfortable place for the night.  There was a better
camp three hours higher; but the weather, after a fine morning, had begun
to look bad and the snow was in bad condition.  The men, too, though
perfectly happy, were most of them very tired, and some of them knocked
over by what they supposed to be mountain sickness --- symptoms of
exhaustion, headache, pains in the abdomen, dizziness and so forth.  I knew
what the trouble was and went round to the sufferers and dropped a little
atropine into their eyes.  Half an hour later they were all perfectly
restored.  The alarming symptoms were all due to the glare.
     I sent down to Pache to come up to Camp 3 as better in every way than
Camp 2.  I asked Tartarin and Reymond if they had any messages to send.
They were too exhausted to reply to their names.  I was utterly bewildered.
The previous day had been a bare hour, and the march to Camp 4 perfectly
easy and by no means long or trying for men without loads.  I myself,
though I had borne the burden and heat of the day more than anyone, was as
fresh as paint and as fit as a fiddle.  I had never felt better in my life.
I was in perfect condition in every respect.  I spent the afternoon nursing
the invalids.
     Tartarin recovered by the next morning sufficiently to curse.  I could
not imagine what his grievance was an cannot imagine it now.  The most
charitable explanation of his conduct that I can give is that he was
mentally upset, partly no doubt due to psychical distress, and to some form
of heat stroke.  I have always been satanically happy in the hottest
sunshine, but the slopes of Kangchenjunga on a fine day at noon were near
my limit.  Both the doctor and Reymond were unquestionably very ill.  It
was impossible to think of going on to the next camp that day.  We rested
accordingly.  Late in the day, to my surprise, Pache arrived with a number
of coolies, I had asked him to send up the sirdar and one other man.  I
wanted to give Naga personal instructions about the management of his men.
It had been no part of my plan for any of the others to come beyond Camp 3.
I wanted to make Camp 3 the base until we found a good place on the snow
basis above.  The arrival of Pache and his men overcrowded Camp 4.
     The root of the trouble, apart from any ill-feeling, was that none of
my companions (except Pache) understood that I expected them to keep their
word.  I had arranged a plan, taking into consideration all sorts of
circumstances, the importance of which they did not understand and other of
which

{435}




















they did not even know, and they did not realize that to deviate from my
instructions in any way might be disastrous.  Their disobedience having
resulted in things going wrong, they proceeded to blame me.  Righi had
refused point blank to send Nanga on my express command; he had failed to
send up any supplies, so that we were absolutely out of petroleum and short
of food, both for ourselves an for our men.
     Pache reported that some of the men had deserted.  It was never
cleared up why they should have done so.  But one of them, in disobedience
to orders, had gone off by himself --- I never discovered exactly where ---
and had fallen and been killed.  This man, it was said, was carrying
Pache's sleeping valise.  This at least was certain, that the valise was
missing.
     An accident being alleged, I sent down the doctor on the following
morning to make in inquiry into the matter, and also to send up supplies of
food and fuel which we needed urgently.  Pache told me that Righi was
deliberately withholding food from us.  His conduct was murderously
criminal, if only because we might have been prevented by bad weather from
descending in the last resort.
     That afternoon Reymond and I mad a little excursion up the slopes.  We
found that the snow was not as bad as might have been expected, and the
gradients were so easy and the glacier so free from ice fall that there
would be no danger for a prudently conducted party, even when the snow was
soft.
     On this slope of Kangchenjunga one occasionally meets a condition of
snow which I have never seen elsewhere.  Rain or sleet blows against the
face of the mountain and is frozen as it touches.  The result is to produce
a kind of network of ice; as frozen drop serves as a nucleus from which
radiate fine filaments of ice in every direction.  It is like a spider's
web in three dimensions.  A cubic foot of network would thus be almost
entirely composed of air; the ice in it, if compact, would hardly be bigger
than a tennis ball, perhaps much less.  With the advance of the evening,
the rain turns to snow; and in the morning it may be that the network is
covered to a depth of several inches.  The temperature possibly rises a few
degrees and the surface becomes wet.  It then freezes again and forms a
hard crust. Approaching a slope of this kind, it seems perfectly good n‚v‚.
One strikes it with one's axe and the entire structure disintegrates.  In
front one one is a hole as big as a cottage and as the solid slope
disappears, one hears the tinkle of falling ice.  It is a most astonishing
and disconcerting phenomenon.
     During the while time that I was on the mountain, I experienced no
high wind and no unpleasant cold.  But the heat of the day was certainly
very severe.  My skin had gradually become inured to the sun.  I had not
been burnt painfully in ten years.  I simply browned quietly and
pleasantly.  But on Kangchenjunga it got me --- not badly enough to cause
sores -- but enough to make the skin somewhat painful and brittle.  Here
was another

{436}


















reason for starting early in the day and reaching camp, if possible, by
noon at the latest.
     On the nineteenth, having dispatched Tartarin to the rear, Reymond,
Pache and myself went on with our small party.  The doctor was, of course,
to make sure of sending up supplies and Pache's valise.  We reached Camp 5
in about three hours.  It was situated on a little snowy hump below a small
peak on the ridge.  We intended to make out way to the path between this
peak and the main spur.  The slopes were rather steep in one or two places,
but quite without danger, as they eased off a short distance below (about
two hundred and fifty feet) to a practically level part of the glacier.  I
should, in fact, have preferred to go straight up them instead of making
the detour by the rocks on the edge of the big precipice, had it not been
that a small patch of s‚rac overhung them.
     No valise arrived for Pache that night, and no petrol or rations.  We
were accordingly obliged to rest the next day.  I had given Pache my
eiderdown sleeping-bag and one of my blankets.  He was thus quite
comfortable physically; but he was, of course, anxious about his effects.
All his spare boots, clothes etc. were in the missing bag, and all his
private papers.
     During the day a few provisions arrived, but no rations for the men,
and no petrol.  I sent back one of the men with urgent orders and several
others to assist in carrying the supplies.  (Also because we could not feed
them where we were.)  I wrote a second letter to Tartarin the same day; a
man arrived at last with the petrol.  In this letter which was signed by
Pache as well as myself, the blame for the failure of the bandobast was
given entirely to Righi.

          It seems to me and to Pache also that the shortage of food is the
     fault of M. Righi who refused to send Naga when Pache told him to do
     so.  This disobedience, which has come so near to involving us in
     disaster, must not be repeated.  All the loads should be sent to Camp
     3 except those which are under shelter.  Righi must be responsible for
     carrying this out.  For yourself, you should join us as soon as you
     can with at least ten loads of asttu and Naga to help us.  The next
     three days will be the crisis of the expedition.
                        With cordial friendship, yours.

     There was no difficulty whatever in carrying out these perfectly
simple, normal instructions.
     Camp 5 is at the height of twenty to twenty-one thousand feet and
certainly not more than two to three thousand feet above Camp 3.  We had
taken the first ascent very easily, it having been transformed into a
regular snow track with immense steps made solid by repeated regelation.
It might be called two hours' easy going.  The doctor had recovered his
health and his

{437}



















good humour, and we had none of us a moment's doubt that he would put the
fear of God into Righi and carry out the above instructions promptly and
efficiently.
     On Thursday, August 31st, I started up the slopes with six men and a
perfectly light heart.  The problem was, of course, how to get the coolies
up with the minimum of trouble.  I sent Salama ahead with an axe and
shovels on a rope.  Their job was to clear away all loose snow and to
enlarge the steps made by Salama so that the way up the mountain should be
literally a staircase of the easiest kind.  Their leader was a man named
Gali.  I remained close to him throughout so that if by any chance he fell
I could catch him.
     I would not rope myself, so as to be able to go to the rescue
instantly in case Salama got tired or came to a passage too difficult for
him.  We advanced very rapidly.  We were certainly over twenty-one thousand
and possibly over twenty-two thousand feet.  There were no symptoms of the
slightest deficiency of physical energy on the part of anyone.  I have
never seen a man ply an ice-axe faster than Salama did that day.  I was, of
course, very carefully on the lookout for the slightest tendency on the
part of the snow to slip.
     We had reached a shallow couloir.  Reymond and Salama had got some
distance ahead of the coolies.  Some of the chips of ice dislodged by their
step-cutting were sliding down in our direction and they began to carry
some of the surface with them.  I was warned by the gentle purring hiss,
rather like a tea kettle beginning to sing, which tells one that loose snow
is beginning to move.  Gali saw the little avalanche, coming towards him,
was frightened and fell out of his steps.  I caught him, put him back and
hastily anchored the rope to a wedged axe.  But the man had completely host
his nerve and by the operation of that instinct which make a drowning man
throw up his hands, began to do the one thing that could possibly have
brought him to harm --- to untie himself from the rope.  I ordered him to
desist, but he was quite hysterical, uttered senseless cries and took no
notice.  There was only one thing to do to save him from the consequences
of his suicidal actions, and that was to make him more afraid of me than he
was of the mountain; so I reached out and caught him a whack with my axe.
It pulled him together immediately and prevented his panic communicating
itself to the other men.  Things then went on all right.
     Some of the slopes were really very bad; deep soft snow on ice.  One
short patch was at an angle of fifty degrees.  It was a question of fixing
a rope or finding a new route to the left, which I did not want to do as I
was in doubt about the glacier above.  There were some s‚racs which might
or might not be stable.  We went down to Camp 5 without further adventure,
but the morale of the men had been shaken by the incident of the toy
avalanche.  Their imaginations got out of hand.  They began to talk
nonsense about the demons

{438}




















of Kangchenjunga and magnified the toy avalanche and Gali's slip and wallop
to the wildest fantasies.  During the night some of them slipped away and
went down to Camp 3.
     On September 1st we renewed the assault.  Reymond, Pache and Salama
went up the sloes on the rope and got over the bad patch.  They were so
much encouraged by their success that they went out of sight and hearing,
contrary to my instructions.  I needed them to help the three coolies with
loads over the had part.  They preferred to leave the whole responsibility
to me, but I could not bring three heavily loaded men up such slopes
without assistance, and there was nothing to do but await their return.  In
the meantime, I saw to my surprise that a large party had arrived at Camp
5.  When I dot down I found that Tartarin's hysteria and Pighi's malignant
stupidity had created yet another muddle.
     They had arrived at the camp, bringing with them some seventeen or
twenty coolies, and they had not brought any of the things of which we
stood in such need.  Their behaviour was utterly unintelligible.  The
doctor did not seem to know what he was saying; his remarks were merely
confusedly irritated.  He did not seem to be able to answer any of my
questions or give any explanation of what had happened in the past.  His
one idea was to hold a durbar and have himself elected leader in my place.
There was no provision in our agreement for any such folly.  He pointed out
that it was merely a scrap of paper.  When the others arrived, an excited
argument began.  There was no suggestion that I had acted improperly in any
way.  From first to last it was merely the feeling of foreigners against
being bossed by an Englishman.  The same thing had happened with Pfannl on
Chogo Ri.
     On the present occasion, however, the Englishman was in a minority of
one.  Fortunately I had never heard that a fact of that sort makes any
difference to an Englishman.  I did my best to reason with them and quiet
them, like the naughty children they were.  Reymond had nothing to complain
of and was actively friendly.
     Indeed, I had much more to worry me than the nonsense of Tartarin and
Righi.  They had brought up all these men without any provisions for food
or shelter and it was now late in the day.  The snow was in an absolutely
unsafe condition and though I had chosen the route so as to minimize the
danger, it was absolutely criminal to send men down.  But the mutineers
were utterly insensible to the voice of reason.  I told the coolies that
since they could not stay at Camp 5, the best thing they could do was to
shelter under the rocks at Camp 4, and they went off and did so.  I warned
the mutineers that they would certainly be killed if they tried to go down
that night; it was perhaps more or less right for coolies, but for THEM ---
I knew only too well the extent of Tartarin's ingenuity in producing
accidents out of the most apparently unpromising material.  They stormed
all the more.  I ought to have

{439}




















broken the doctor's leg with an axe, but I was too young to take such a
responsibility.  It would have been hard to prove afterwards that I had
saved him by so doing.
     To my horror, I found that Pache wanted to go down with them.  The
blackguards had not even had the decency to bring up his valise.  I
implored him to wait till the morning.  I told him he could have the whole
of my sleeping kit.  But nothing would move him.  I explained the
situation, but I suppose he could not believe that I was telling the
literal truth when I  said that Guillarmod was at the best of times a
dangerous imbecile on mountains, and that now he had developed into a
dangerous maniac.  I shook hands with him with a breaking heart, for I had
got very fond of the man, and my last words were, "Don't go: I shall never
see you again.  You'll be a dead man in ten minutes."  I had miscalculated
once more; a quarter of an hour later he was still alive.
     Less than half an hour later, Reymond and I heard frantic cries.  No
words could be distinguished, but the voices were those of Tartarin and
Righi.  Reymond proposed going to the rescue at once, but it was now nearly
dark and there was nobody to send, owing to Righi's having stripped us of
men.  There was, furthermore, no indication as to why they were yelling.
They had been yelling all day.  Reymond had not yet taken his boots off.
He said he would go and see if he could see what was the matter and call me
if my assistance were required.  He went off and did not return or call.
So I went to sleep and rose the next morning at earliest dawn and went to
investigate.
     The task was easy.  About fifteen minutes below Camp 5 the track had
been carried away over a width of twenty feet (seven short paces).  The
angle of the slope was roughly twenty degrees (limits of error twenty-five
degrees and twelve degrees).  The avalanche had stopped two hundred and
fifty feet below, and at this point it was from forty to sixty feet in
width; that is to say, it was an absolutely trivial avalanche.  A single
man could have ridden it head first without the slightest risk of hurting
himself.  The width of the avalanche (and other signs) showed that six men
on a 120-foot rope had been walking on each other's heels, the rope being
festooned so as to be worse than useless.  A man struggling in loose show
avalance has a fair chance of getting to the top, but if every time he does
so he is jerked away by the rope, it will be the greatest piece of luck if
he is not killed.  Tartarin, who should have been the last man on a descent
in order to watch the others, to see that the rope was kept stretched, and
to check any slip at the outset, was leading.
     Here is Righi's account of the accident.

          Suddenly the four men above us began to slide; we hoped they
     would be able to stop themselves, but the slope was too steep.  They
     swept past us like lightning.  The doctor and I did the best we could
     to stop them, but


{440}


















     in vain; for, as they rushed downwards, they started an avalanche (the
     snow being in such a moist condition from the afternoon sun, and
     easily moved).  I was torn away from my anchor, head downwards, the
     doctor vainly calling to me to hang on as we might be able to stop the
     others.  I was pulled down in what seemed a whirlwind of snow.  I
     remember nothing during the fall.  The doctor followed and fell
     farther down.  I came to a few minutes after, hearing the doctor
     calling and telling me to get up.  I could not do so, being pinned
     down on one side by the rope which was straight into the avalanche,
     and on the other I was keeping the doctor from falling farther down
     the slope.  Had he been killed by the fall, I should have been
     helpless and most likely would have been frozen where I lay.

     It is noteworthy that some seventeen coolies without ropes, axes,
boots, claws and Tartarin, had crossed the fatal spot quite safely.
     I found these men perfectly happy.  They had taken my advice and
passed the night under the rocks by Camp 4.  I slowly descended, they
following at a short distance.  Presently I came to a place where the snow
had slipped off the glacier ice for some distance.  The angle was decidedly
steep, and though I was able to cross it easily enough in my claws, it
would not do for the coolies; so I called to them to go higher up over the
glacier.  But they were afraid to do this.  They said they wanted to follow
me, which they did, after enlarging my steps with an axe.  At the time, I
had no doubt that this place was the scene of the accident, if there had
been one,of which I was not sure.  Anyhow, I could not see how even
Tartarin could have come to grief on so easy and safe a slope as the other.
But on arrival at Camp 3 I was able to understand what had happened.
Thanks to my habits of accuracy, I had taken careful measurements.
     Pache and three of my best coolies had been killed.  Tartarin was
badly bruised, and thought his spine was damaged.  The accident had brought
him completely to his senses.  He realized that I had been right all along,
and was appalled by the prospects of returning to Switzerland and meeting
Pache's mother.
     Righi, on the other hand, showed only the more what an ill-conditioned
cur he was.  He had not been hurt at all badly, but his ribs were slightly
bruised; he claimed that he had "rupture of the heart", and spent his time
moaning and bellowing.  That his sufferings were mostly pure funk was
evident from the fact that he forgot all about them directly he was engaged
in conversation.
     I ought to have been much angrier than I was, for the conduct of the
mutineers amounted to manslaughter.  By breaking their agreement, they had
assumed full responsibility.  It was impossible for me to continue with

{441}






















the expedition.  My authority had been set at nought, and I would not risk
any man's life.  Eckenstein had made it the first point of mountaineering
that the proper measures invariably reduced the risk of accident to
nothing.  They wanted me to go on.  Righi himself said that the coolies
believed the demon of Kangchenjunga was propitiated with the sacrifice of
the five men --- one for each peak --- and would go on in future without
fear.  He had a little image given him by a Tibetan lama.  This had saved
his life.  He never took any important step without consulting it, and it
had now told him that we could climb the mountain without difficulty.  Like
Queen Victoria on a celebrated occasion I was not amused.
     As a matter of fact, the coolies had been very much demoralized by the
accident.  Small blame to them: I told Righi, as transport officer, to
bring down my belongings from Camp 5.  He parleyed with them, gave it up as
hopeless, and turned it over to me.  I told the sirdar to send up men at
once to help Salama and Bahadur Singh, who were still at Camp 5.  He made
no difficulty and sent up, not two men,but twelve.  They brought
everything.  I made the necessary arrangements about digging out the
corpses and building them a commemorative cairn, which was done.  The next
day, September 3rd, I left, and reached Darjeeling on Friday.
     Here I was faced by an extraordinary circumstance, illustrating the
fact that when men loose their heads on mountains they lose them very
completely.  The money of the expedition was banked against the signature
of either myself or Guillarmod.  He had written to the manager to ask him
to refuse to honour my signature!  The bank though he must be out of his
mind, and advised me to draw the whole of the amount so as to be sure that
it would be used to pay the coolies the sums due to them.  This I did.  On
the twentieth the others arrived.  I had all the amounts in proper order.
I immediately paid the men what was due, with a reasonable amount of
backsheesh.  In view of Tartarin's extraordinary behaviour about money, I
was on my guard.  He was anxious not to come to a settlement.  I, on the
other hand, had no further business in Darjeeling, and I naturally asked
him to sign a release, which he did.

          Sept. 20, 1905.  Les comptes de l'exp‚dition ‚tant d‚finitivement
     r‚gl‚s le 20 Sept. 1905, nous d‚clarons que tout r‚clamation aprŠs
     cette date, sera nulle.  La somme des compensations dues aux parents
     des morts sera pay‚e par la caisse de l'exp‚dition.
                                D. J. Jacot Guillarmod

He became very friendly and asked me to lend him or give him money.  My
account of the accident having been fairly frank, there was some question
of a public inquiry.
     I wrote accounts of the expedition for the "Pioneer" of India and the
"Daily"

{442}




















"Mail" of London, and I republished them later in "Vanity Fair."  I used these
articles to attack the English Alpine Club.  Every incident served for the
occasion of some gibe, sarcasm, insult or irony.  I had no personal motive,
of course.  I wished to hold up to ridicule and contempt the set of old
women who were knocking the sport on the head by intriguing against any
climbers who were no simply polite people pulled up peaks by peasants and
proud of it at that.  The Alpine Club has done its best to ignore Himalayan
expeditions, as it did to burke every ascent by guideless climbers in the
Alps.
     The lessons of the Kangchenjunga expedition were not learnt; so we
hear in 1922 the old idiocy that coolies should not start till it is quite
warm.  The Everest party repeated the fatal fatuity of the doctor, by
putting seven men on one rope, and that without knowing the use of the
rope, so that one fall of one man must inevitably drag down the others.
When I heard the composition of the Everest party and its plans, I prepared
an article to warn them they were violating every principle of common
sense, and could only meet with further failure and disaster.  I foretold
exactly what would happen, except that I heartily hoped that the Englishmen
would be killed and their coolies escape by some miracle.
      It was not to be.  They made the mistake against which I had warned
them; they had precisely the same kind of accident as in 1905 that resulted
from the mutinous violation of my orders; but, just as the doctor and Righi
had escaped with their worthless lives, to go about the world with the
manslaughter of their comrades on their consciences, so also it happened in
1922.
     But the London press refused to publish my article.  One editor told
me that it was a shame to "crab" the expediton, and that my warnings would
give pain to the relations of the party!  No, better wait until the
accident had happened, and then it would be interesting to point out why it
had happened.  Of course that is the journalistic point of view.  Disasters
should not be prevented.  Heaven forbid!  We should rather encourage
battle, murder and sudden death.  Our business is to make the splash.  This
psychology is one of my reasons for holding the press in horror.  I do not
believe in restrictions on business enterprise, but it really ought to be
made impossible that it should be to anyone's interest to bring about a
European war.
     On the twenty-third Guillarmod came to see me and ask me to say no
more in the public press, as far as he was concerned.  On the twenty-fourth
we discussed the whole matter.  He admitted that he had been in the wrong
and excused himself (on the ground of ill-health and nervousness) for his
behaviour.  I thought I knew him; he was simply a fool but incapable of
malice or treachery.  On the twenty-fifth he and Righi made a violent
attack on me in the columns of a newspaper, but "out of their own mouths"!
Their admission proved my case.  In particular, they blamed the coolies, so
I had to write

{443}



















to the paper, "I would most especially call attention to the repeated
complaints against the coolies as evidence of incapacity to manage them,
and emphasize my own testimony to their steadiness, capacity and goodwill."
     Guillarmod's overtures had been intended merely to give them time to
strike.  "Cet animal est trŠs m‚cant: quand on l'attaque il se d‚fend."  I
hit back and cut Guillarmod publicly on the twenty-sixth.  On the twenty
seventh I received the following amazing letter.

          27.IX.05
     Lord Boleskne,
          Vos proc‚d‚s financiers puent l'escroc … plein nez & font honneur
     … la noblesse irlandaise.
          Faire signer un papier par lequel je d‚clare ne plus rien
     r‚clamer alors que vous savez pertinemment que j'oublie plusieurs
     d‚penses est un acte aussi honnˆte que l'hospitalit‚ ‚cossaise
     (haggis).
          Je comprends maintenant les raisons qui vous font rechercher les
     endroits recul‚s & inhabit‚s; vous craignez trop de rencontrer de vos
     dupes, filou que vous ˆtes.
          Je conserve pr‚cieusement le re‡du de 300 Rs que vous venez
     d'envoyer … Reymond & si demain … 10 h. du matin je n'ai pas re‡u un
     chŠque de cette somme, je d‚pose avec une plainte en escroquerie un
     exemplaire des "Snowdrops" o— vous pr‚f‚reriez ne pas le voir.
                                                       J.J.G.

     I took it at once to a lawyer who warned him that by the Indian penal
code he was rendering himself liable to a long term in prison.  I realized
that the man was simply insane with remorse and did not press the charge.
On the contrary despite the agreement of the twentieth, I agreed to pay him
a small sum for certain items which had been overlooked.  I went down to
Calcutta on the twenty-eighth, and a week later accepted an invitation from
the Maharaja of Moharbhanj to shoot big game in his province.
     I was very sad at heart about the death of my friends, but with regard
to the mountain I was in excellent spirits.  I had demonstrated beyond
doubt the existence of an easy way up.  I was sure of being able to
establish a main camp within striking distance of the summit, and I had
familiarized myself with all the vagaries of the weather and the snow.  Cut
short as the expedition had been, at its first leap, the actual attainment
had not been insignificant.  We had reached a height of approximately
twenty-five thousand feet, and found life at that altitude as enjoyable and
work as easy as anywhere else.  I had written a detailed proposal to
Eckenstein, suggesting that we should tackle the mountain in 1906 --- but
no foreigners!

{444}
























                              53



      I had been so concentrated on Kangchenjunga that the other facts of
my life had not glittered perceptibly.  They had kept up with me, but I
hardly knew it.  They were now to shine, the bushel of Kangchenjunga having
been rudely removed.
     My instinct against "The Book of the Law" had apparently had its way.
It was as if the events of eighteen months before had never taken place.  I
was going on with Magick on the old lines, without any particular
aqmbition, but quietly exercising the powers already obtained.  For
instance, I had established regular communications with Soror F. (Soror
Fidelis --- Mrs. Elaine Simpson).  We had long interviews, visiting each
other alternately.  I was a little better than she was, but her body was
quite material enough to impress all the senses.
     It occurs to me that I ought to give further details.  Our astral
bodies, as we had got them, were replicas of our physical bodies, save that
they were slightly larger.  Hers, for example, was just over sic feet high
instead of five feet seven inches.  The body was self-luminous and
partially transparent, so that I could see the background behind her, much
as through a muslin curtain.  The substance of the body appeared
homogeneous.  It was usually clothed and crowned.  The materials were of
the same quality of matter as the body, but could be distinguished from
flesh by such optical devices as colour and reflections.  We moved
according to the laws of the astral plane; that is, without making the
normal physical actions, though we were able to use our limbs in the
ordinary way.  We communicated, sometimes by audible speech, sometimes by
direct transmission of thought such as occurs every day in ordinary life,
when one knows what a friend is going to say before he says it.
     One very curious phenomenon must be recorded.  In the early days we
had arranged special hours for our interviews by calculating the difference
of time due to longitude.  We now summoned each other by means of the
astral bell.  But on comparison of our records we discovered an astounding
fact.  Although we agreed about the character of the interview, the subject
of conversation etc., we found that the time did not necessarily
correspond.  That is: suppose I went to see her at midnight on Friday
(India), she did not see me at four a.m. on Saturday (England) but at some
other time which might be later or earlier.  I could easily imagine a delay
in my appearance, but it seemed to me nonsense that I should have arrived
before I started!  At that time I understood little of the nature of time.

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     My lyric gift had begun to sit up and take notice a little after the
shock of the realization of all its aspirations.  I had begun to write
again.  Some of my poems at this period were definitely rationalistic.  I
was already aware that the rationalist position was wooden and shallow.
The members of the Rationalist Press Association were no less narrow-minded
sectarians than the Evangelicals.  They had the same suburban point of
view, the same prudish exclusiveness; they were shocked by any fact which
did not immediately fit into their framework, and angrily denied its
existence.
     I was shifting slowly back to Buddhism; though even more impatient
than before of Buddhists, their parochial morality and their emphasis on
the evils of existence.  But I wrote a few lyrics about love and nature
which are still among my best.  I may mention "The Song".

          Dance a measure
             Of the tiniest whirls!
          Shake out your treasure
             Of cinnamon curls!
          Tremble with pleasure
             O wonder of girls!
          Rest is bliss,
             And bliss is rest,
          Give me a kiss
             If you love me best!
          Hold me like this
             With my hand on your breast!

     There was also "Said", inspired by my week in Cairo: "Patchouli", a
shot of rhapsody upon African and Asiatic themes; "The Jilt", a piece of
sadistic exultation over my wife's cruelty to Howell, who we heard was
stricken to the heart by the thunderbolt of her marriage.  Then there was
"The Eyes of Pharaoh", a terrific presentation of the mystery of Egypt, and
"Benzai", a poem in praise of Japan, then at was with Russia.  There was a
new note in my work: that of humour.  "The Beauty and the Bikkhu" is a
versification of a Buddhist legend.  The original is unconsciously funny,
and I brought this out, while preserving the sublimity of the story.  Again
"Immortality" develops an idea in the "Gorgias" of Plato that after death one
goes on doing very much what one did before.  The style is at once
passionate, pictorial, and terrifying and witty.
     Another new string to my lyre; I had been reproaching myself for my
ignorance of the Sufi doctrines, and intended to cross Persia on my way
back to England.  For this purpose I began to study the language with a
munshi.  I began to imitate the poets of Iran.  "Ali and Hassan" is a
paraphrase from Alf Laylah Wa Laylah.  "Al Malik" is a ghazal; that is, a
series of couplets

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with a monorime.  The first two lines and each successive even line rime
with each other.  In Darjeeling (on my return) I had had a brief but
intense liaison with a Napali girl, Tenbuft.  I celebrated this passion in
a rondel "Tarshitering".

                       NEPALI LOVE SONG

O kissable Tarshitering!  The wild bird calls its mate --- and I?
Come to my tent this night of May, and cuddle close and crown me king!
Drink, drink or fill of love at last -- a little while and we shall die,
                   O kissable Tarshitering!

Droop the long lashes; close the eyes with eyelids like beetle's wing!
Light the slow smile, ephemeral as ever a painted butterfly,
Certain to close into a kiss, certain to fasten on me and sting!

Nay?  Are you coy?  hen I will catch your hips and hold you wild and shy
Until your very struggles set your velvet buttocks all a-sqing,
Until their music lulls you to unfathomable ecstasy,
                  O kissible Tarshitering!

     I must explain that oriental modesty does not allow the self-
respecting poet to introduce the name of a woman, just as in Shakespeare's
time it was considered scandalous for a woman to appear on the stage.  I
respected this convention and replaced the name of Tenguft by a male name,
which I thought euphonious and suitable to my scheme of time and scansion.
     Moharbhanj was an ideal place for meditation.  I had absolute leisure,
I was at the top of my form physically and every other way, and I could not
start anything serious until my wife and child arrived, which they did not
do until October 29th.  I was in a wild district with no one to talk to; it
afforded the maximum opportunity for taking stock of my life, finding out
what the past meant and taking aim for the future.
     The Durga Puja was in course.  I was able to appreciate the enthusiasm
of the aboriginal Hindu much better than I could have done in Calcutta,
where the corrosion of civilization has eaten into primitive practice.
     Moharbhanj, though only thirteen hours from Calcutta, is as far from
it morally as it is from London.  The people were unspoilt.  For the first
time I liked Hindus.  The maharajah was away for the day.  He had sent his
Minister of Public works to meet me and entertain me until his return.
This gentleman, whose name was Martin, had taken a high degree at Oxford,
and had studied science and engineering very thoroughly.  No one could have
suspected that he had a Bengali grandmother.  But in the first twenty-four
hours I had discovered the truth of the aphorism "Blood will tell".  For
all his European education, he believed in the most primitive
superstitions, from ghosts and witches to mysterious medicines.

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     The next day the maharajah returned.  I found him an extremely
interesting and delightful companion.  One could hardly expect less from
the direct descendant of a peacock.  I am sorry to say that he did not take
his ancestry seriously.  He had exchanged his illusions for another set far
less fascinating, far less inspiring and equally absurd.  He believed in
Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill.  One of his stories is extremely
instructive.  If it were graven upon the eye-corners, it would be a warning
to such as would be warned!  There are no principles of politics, economics
and the rest; it is all balderdash.  More, it is a damnable heresy and a
dangerous delusion to apply the theories of the Thames valley to the
practice of the Coromandel coast.
     Moharbhanj is a province on the sea-board of Orissa.  In my wanderings
I came to a range of hills of unparalleled wonder.  It was between ten and
twenty miles in length, and some three thousand feet high.  The marvel of
it is that it is composed very largely of pure iron pyrites, whose bare
outcrop forms huge rounded bosses.  I first saw these hills at sunset, and
they glowed with crimson splendour too vivid to be merely mineral.  It was
like blood on a bull's shoulder in the sunlight.  The maharajah knew the
commercial value of his mountains, but he had no coal; to exploit his
treasure he needed a light railway from the mountains to the sea.
     When he came to the throne he nobly determined to confer the benefits
of liberal principles upon his people.  Now he was not only the Maharajah
of Moharbhanj, but its zemindar or landlord.  He wished to create  a
peasantry of prosperous and independent freeholders.  He understood that it
would be fatal to make them a present of the land; so he made a law by
which any man who cultivated his land continuously for fifteen years would
at the end of that time become its owner.  As is generally known, the
greatest pride of the Hindu is to make his daughter's wedding as
splendiferous as possible.  For this purpose he will get himself into debt
for generations ahead as recklessly as the most progressive nation will do
for their own pet phantom of glory.
     So as soon as the new law was proclaimed, the Marwaris descended upon
Moharbhanj like locusts, and advanced sums beyond the wildest imaginations
of the peasants, to them.  The marriages were magnificent; so were the
mortgages.  At the end of fifteen years the land belonged not to the
cultivator but to the alien usurer.  The maharajah could not even see that
he had ruined himself and his subjects.  He told me with honest pride, "I
have conferred great benefit upon my people."  Yet he was in a comical
state of distress because the Marwaris refused to grant him the concession
to build the light railway so that he could melt up his mountains!  In the
meanwhile the people were poorer than before, though the administration of
his revenues by the British had increased his personal income from three to
eighteen lakhs of rupees in less than twenty years.
     He told me one enthralling story about his raj.  A great deal of it is

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unexplored and impenetrable jungle.  In the clearing are villages inhabited
by very primitive folk of a different race to the bulk of the population.
I saw a good deal of these people.  They go in many cases naked.  At the
most, they wear a rudimentary loin cloth.  They have a language of their
own which possesses a few affinities with outer dialects.  It possesses
less than three hundred words, some two hundred and fifty of which are
classed as obscene.  The men are armed with bows and arrows, or
occasionally spears, some of which show great skill of metallurgy and
workmanship as well as a knowledge of certain branches of mechanics, and a
marked sense of beauty.
     The women are free from the ordinary Hindu inhibitions, and their
breasts are the most beautiful that I have ever seen, not excepting those
of the women ofTehuantepec.  They are small and well proportioned.  Even
when the women are mothers, they do not lose their form.  The whole breast
stands firm and points upwards.  To the eye of the artist, the female
breast of the European is a hideous deformity.  Even in the case of the
most beautiful women, it breaks the line of the body, and it makes one
think of a cow.  But these women bear their breasts in triumph.  One thinks
of the phallophorus in a pagan procession.
     Men and women alike are admirably proportioned, muscular and active.
Their habit of carrying loads on the head --- a coolie carries thirty
pounds, which, considering the heat of the plains, is equivalent to the
fifty pounds of the hillman --- gives them perfect balance and makes them
light on their feet.  The skin is of that superb velvety black with is
really rich deep purple.  Primitive as these people are, they are as
capable of aesthetics and the popes and princes of the Renaissance.  They
love with rapacious intensity, adorned with all the arts of Aphrodite.
     These folk are considered "wild men of the woods" by the sophisticated
Hindus of the town.  Yet there is a third proportional.
     In the jungle live people known as Jewans, whom I hesitate to describe
as a tribe, because nothing is known of their habits.  Even their
appearance has not been satisfactorily described.  It is said by some that
no white man has ever seen one, though others say that one or two have done
so.  Even the folk of the villages on the confines of the jungle have no
knowledge of them, yet they carry on with them a regular traffic.
     Certain places outside the village are marked out, usually by white
stones, and here they deposit rice and other products of cultivation at
nightfall.  In the morning these goods are found to have been replaced by
various products of the jungle.  It is said that this commerce has never
been degraded by dishonesty.  Attempts have been made to catch the Jewans
in the act of making the exchange, but they have always proved too wary.
     The maharajah did not shoot, but appointed a forest officer named
d'Elbroux to introduce me to the bears and tigers.  The only animal I was

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not allowed to shoot was the elephant.  One has to be a viceroy or a
travelling royalty to indulge in that sport.  D'Elbroux, in his youth, had
come to grips with a bear.  He had been very badly mauled, and many of his
features had been replaced by metal plates.  He told me that he had lain in
the jungle wounded for more than two days before help arrived.
     My only noteworthy shooting adventure was this.  D'Elbroux had
prepared a machan.  There were some seven hundred beaters.  The first
animal that broke was a bear, whom I settled with a shot from the 10-bore.
The second barrel jarred off and the surprise knocked me on my back.  The
bullet struck a tree as thick as a telegraph pole, and cut it in two, so
that it fell across the machan and very nearly killed one of the men.
     My best memory of Moharbhanj is not of tigers and such small fowl, but
of elephants, which I was not allowed to shoot.  I have always felt that my
life has numerous points of contact with "Alice in Wonderland," and I now
come to the incident, "The Elephants did tease so!"
     I went out one night to a bhul, or salt lick, in a tree overlooking
which a machan had been built for me.  A particularly fine tiger was
reputed to visit the place every night.  I took up my vigil immediately
after dinner.  A three-quarter moon was due to rise about half-past eight.
We kept extremely quiet, of course.  I dislike shooting from a machan,
exactly as I dislike coarse fishing.  One cannot do anything to help things
along.  On the contrary, one has to avoid the slightest action.
     The waiting sounds as if it might be good practice for meditation.  I
found it quite the opposite, for the object of one's vigil is itself a
distraction, and if one concentrated on the sport, it would of course
disappear, as had already happened to my nose and my navel.  Soon after
dark I began to hear the noises of the jungle, from the rustling of leaves
and grasses as small animals moved cautiously about their business to the
distant roaring of the tiger.  Once or twice a shadowy shape made the
darkness that brooded over the salt lick deeper, but there was no sense in
risking a shot till moonrise.  I could hardly see my own hands, much less
the sights of my rifle.
     When the moon rose at last, the few animals that had arrived vanished
with equal stealth.  There was a great silence in the jungle and the roars
of the tigers (there were several all round the compass) became less
frequent and less near.
     All of a sudden I became aware of a tremendous disturbance.  It was
not exactly a noise --- I'm inclined to think that it may have been a
smell.  I cannot say definitely more than this, that I had the impression
that something enormous was going on.
     I had been lying flat in the machan, listening.  I raised my head
cautiously.  The silvern glades were now mysteriously peopled with gigantic
shapes.  It was a herd of elephants!  I counted twenty-four of them.  My
shikari whispered

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that there would be no shooting that night; no other animals would venture
into the neighbourhood of the master of the jungle.  I realized, moreover,
that my position was one of extreme danger.  The machan was high from the
ground; but had the elephants winded me and taken alarm, my tree would have
snapped like a twig.  But I had no time to think of danger; I was thrilled
with exaltation.  I sat up and spent the night watching the elephants as
they went about their business.  It was the most fascinating vision that
had ever been vouchsafed to me on the material plane.
     I did not grudge the loss of my night's sport.  I was not really very
keen about the shooting.  I was in a very curious frame of mind.  I loved
to wake at dawn on my camp bed and meditate and read Kant, Berkeley and
Firdausi.  Persian fascinated me more than any other language had ever done
and I revelled in the ideas of the Sufis.  Their esoteric symbolism
delighted me beyond measure.  I took it into my head to go one better than
my previous performance in the way of inventing poets and their
productions.
     I spent most of my time writing ghazals, purporting to be by a certain
Abdullah al Haji (Haji, with a soft "h", satirist, as opposed to Haji with
a hard "h", pilgrim) of Shiraz.  I caused him to flourish about 1600 A.D.,
but gave to the collection of his ghazals the title "Bagh-i-Muattar" ("The"
"Scented Garden"), which implies the date 1905, the value of the Arabic
letters of the title adding up to the equivalent o hat year of the Hegira.
I also invented an Anglo Indian major to find, translate and annotate the
manuscript, an editor to complete the work of that gallant soldier (killed
in South Africa) and a Christian clergyman to discuss the matter of the
poem from the peculiar point of view of high Anglicanism.
     The ghazals themselves are rendered sometimes in the supposed original
monorime, sometimes in prose, and the annotations contain a great deal of
the more esoteric information about the East, which I had picked up from
time to time.  It is especially to be noted that, although I have packed
every kind of magical and mystical lore into the volume, there is nowhere
any reference to "The Book of the Law."  I was setting my whole strength
against the Secret Chiefs.  I was trying to forget the whole business.
     The book itself is a complete treatise on mysticism, expressed in the
symbolism prescribed by Persian piety.  It describes the relations of God
and man, explains how the latter falls from his essential innocence by
allowing himself to be deceived by the illusion of matter.  His religion
cease to be real and become formal; he falls into sin and suffers the
penalty thereof.  God prepares the pathway of regeneration and brings him
through shame and sorrow to repentance, thus preparing the mystical union
which restores man to his original privileges, free will, immortality, the
preception of truth  and so on.
     I put the last ounce of myself into this book.  My previous efforts in
the

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same direction would have deceived nobody, but the "Bagh-i-Muatar", despite
my inability to produce the Persian original --- my excuse was that it was
rare and held the most sacred and most secret, but was being copied for me
--- persuaded even experienced scholars that it was genuine.  It was issued
by Probsthain & Co., by private subscription, in 1910.  I have heard of a
copy changing hands at fifty guineas.
     This spurt of genius is an eloquent portrait of my mind at this time.
I was absolutely convinced of the supreme importance of devoting my life to
attaining Samadhi, conscious communion with the Immanent Soul of the
Universe.  I believed in mysticism.  I understood perfectly the essence of
its method and the import of its attainment, but I felt compelled to
express myself in a satirical and (it might appear to some) almost
scandalous form.  I testified to the tremendous truth by piling fiction
upon fiction.  I did not know it.  I did not suspect it, but the "Bagh-i-"
"Muattar" is a symptom of supreme significance.  I was on the brink of a
totally new development.
     On Sunday, October 22nd, I had an astral interview with Soror F. which
brought my up with a shock.  She was accompanied by a golden hawk, in whom
I later recognized one of the Secret Chiefs of the A.'. A.'..  The
conversation turned on the subject of the Great Work.  It was defined as
the creation of a new universe.  The interview left me spiritually
prostrate.  I had been perfectly happy with my programme, doing a little
work there and a little there; Magick on Monday and teaching on Tuesday, so
to speak; advising any applicant that approached me; editing and publishing
any documents that fell into my hands.
     But the Secret Chiefs were determined not to allow me to fool myself.
When they picked me out o do their work they meant me to get busy and do
it, and were going to see that I did.  They did not insist on my taking up
the work of the New Aeon.  They knew their business too well.  They knew
that I should not be ready until I had undergone the proper preparation.
They were content therefore with stirring me up to tackle the problem of my
relations with the universe as seriously as the Buddha had done twenty-five
centuries before.
     I rode into Moharbhanj hardly aware of my surroundings.  I was
criticizing myself with ruthless severity.  I do not remember whether "The"
"Book of the Law" so much as crossed my mind.  If so, I must have put it
angrily aside.  All I did know was that I should not have a moment's peace
again until I had solved the great problem and I had no idea how to tackle
it.  I began to set my ideas in order.
      Returned again to Calcutta.  One day I went over to Kalighat and
sacrificed a goat to a goddess.  That night I was sitting alone reading.
She appeared to me and inspired me to write a poem to her.  I quote the
first two stanzas:

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                             KALI

          There is an idol in my house
          By whom the sandal always steams.
          Alone, I make a black carouse
          With her to dominate my dreams.
          With skulls and knives she keeps control
          (O Mother Kali!) of my soul.

          She is crowned with emeralds like leaves,
          and rubies flame from either eye;
          A rose upon her bosom heaves,
          Turquois and Lapis Lazuli.
          She hath a kirtle like a maid ---
          Amethyst, amber, pearl, and jade!

     This poem is important as foreshadowing my final solution of the
problem of evil and sorrow, the interpretation of illusion by the initiate
and its transmutation into truth.
     I saw as usual a good deal of Thornton.  One morning, driving down the
Maidan in his tum-tum, I said, "I cannot formulate a plan of action of any
kind because there is no true continuity in phenomena."  He turned on my
quite simply, and said, "Quite so, but there is equally no continuity in
yourself."  That, of course, was no news to me.  It was Hume's answer to
Berkeley, for one thing.  It was the essence ofSakkaya-Ditthi, for another.
The ground was cut away from under my feet.  At the moment, my
consciousness failed to pick up the full purport of this proposition, for I
found myself suddenly forced into action by a set of circumstances of which
I had no control, and which bore no relation to any past purpose of my
life.  But I believe they were arranged for me by the Secret Chiefs.
     My wife was due to arrive with the baby on the twenty-ninth and the
natural thing would have been to see a little of Calcutta society,
especially as I was naturally a bit of a lion, and then stroll across Asia
somewhere, at our leisure.  The Secret Chiefs arranged for me to be in a
situation where I was at their mercy.  They meant to initiate me whether I
liked it or not.  And this is how they went to work.
     I set forth after dinner, one fate-fraught night, to try to get
unguided to a street of infamy called "Culinga Bazar" from the corner of
the Maidan.  It was a worthy feat to attempt; for I had been to the Bazar
only once before, in 1901; and then I had been driven to it in the dark
from afar distant part of Calcutta.  The night was extremely dark; the
streets were lighted only by the flares and fireworks of the native
festival --- the Durga-Puja --- which was in

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course, and all semblance of honesty or decency quitted the houses before I
had advanced three minutes into the bowels of Calcutta.
     As I did so, my savage instincts surged to my brain.  I "smelt" the
direction almost at once; and as I got into this state, I became aware of
impending trouble of some sort, as savages are.  That "eerie feeling",
alone in a desperate section of a foreign city at night?  Nine to one it is
plain funk.  But as I had already admitted, I am the biggest coward alive;
and I have constantly forced myself to face my fear.  So not I was not
tingling with the pleasurable sense of confronting the unknown; I had the
definite sense of being trailed.  The sensation angered me; I tried to
ascribe it to imagination.  I forgot it and I went my way.
     Presently, however, I turned aside for a moment from the dim street I
was treading into an alley guarded by a black archway.  I had no idea where
it might lead; I simply wished to withdraw from the observation of my
fellows for a few seconds, for reasons which are fully described and
justified in Carpenter's "Physiology."
     I passed through the archway.  It was as "dark as the pit".  (I don't
know what pit may be meant.)  The alley beyond was somewhat lighter; the
sky loomed dull blue-grey above.
     I noticed various doorways in the walls; also one at the end of the
alley; I was in a cul-de-sac.  And then I saw, faint glimpses in the gloom,
the waving white of native robes.  Men were approaching me and I was aware
--- through hardly by sight --- that they moved in a semi-military order,
in single file.  There was noting to alarm me in this it is the habit of
natives to march thus.  And yet I was pungently aware that some evil was
meant.  As it happened, I was dressed in dark clothes and my face burnt
deep brown.  I effaced myself against the wall.
    Three of the men passed me; then they turned.  I was surrounded.
Strong hands gripped my arms; greedy hands sought my pockets.  I barked out
sharp orders: they should have no doubt that I was a sahib.  For all answer
I saw the pallid gleam of a knife.
     I must really break off to say that I have always found the psychology
of this incident enthralling.  It stands out in my memory in "alto-relievo."
     I have never on any other occasion had so much time to think --- I am
afraid I express it badly.  I mean that I was acutely conscious of a few
well-marked thoughts, without the usual gradations, sub-thoughts,
connections and so forth, that make it hard --- in ordinary life --- to
discriminate between conscious and unconscious thought.
     On this night I was as primitive as an ape.  My thoughts stand out
stark as stars on a background of utter blackness.  I had become, as by an
enchanter's spell, the primeval caveman.  Perhaps the long strain and
horror of the Kangchenjunga tragedy had prepared me for this sudden
outcropping of atavism.

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     However that might be, I remember nothing but these harsh clear
thoughts, uninterfered with by the usual mental processes.  I felt myself a
"hum,an leopard"; something in me warned me that --- contrary to all common
sense and evidence --- I had lured these men.  I was, so to say, a Q-ship!
I remember the resistance of my civilized self to this insane idea; I was
an English gentleman, attacked without provocation by a band of common
robbers.
     I had given the order that they should unhand me; they had disobeyed a
sahib; my life was in danger.  This being the case, I was right to act in
selfdefence.  I would press the trigger of the Webley on which my
forefinger had rested since the first glimpse of white robes in the alley.
I did so.  There was a slight click.
     Now, my Webley holds five cartridges; I invariably keep the hammer
down on an empty chamber.  The chamber will only revolve freely when the
gun is at half-cock.  Therefore, thought I, "with omnipotence at my command
and eternity at my disposal" I must have been fiddling unconsciously with
the weapon, set it at half-cock and twiddled the chamber round until the
hammer was down, not on the empty space, but on the cartridge next to it,
so that the gun, in cocking itself under trigger-opressure, had dropped the
hammer on the void.  True; but then, to correct the error, it was only
necessary to press the trigger a second time.
     I have purposely described these thoughts in detail, to emphasize the
fact that my mind was working in a more leisurely manner than I had ever
known it to do.  It is all the more amazing to reflect that my whole train
of thought, except the final detail, what to do next, was totally
inaccurate!
     I pressed the trigger again.  My arms were held firmly to my sides,
but even so I was too economically minded to fire through my pocket; I
managed to raise the muzzle above the edge.
     A violent explosion followed.
     I had fired without aim, in pitch blackness; I could not even see the
white robes of the men who held me.  In the lightning moment of the flash I
saw only that whitnesses were falling backwards away from me, as if I had
upset a screen by accident.
     The blackness which followed the flash was Cimmerian.  My eyes are
naturally very slow to accommodate themselves to change of illumination ---
I have never met any man equally helpless in case of sudden diminution of
light.  I had no thought soever as to whether my shot might have hit
anybody.  There was not the faintest sound; but the alley seemed somehow
empty.  I do not know whether I stepped over fallen bodies or not.  (I was
facing the archway when I fired.)
     I thought: I will get out of this alley at once.  Those people may be
lying in ambush in the archway, especially as I do not know whether there
are doors opening out of it or not.  I will keep my forefinger on the
trigger and

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at the same time light a match to make sure of the archway.  When I get out
into the open street, I will walk away very quickly and very quietly, and
go straight to the Dharamtolla road and take a gharry, and drive to Edward
thornton and tell him what has happened.
     I carried out this programme to the letter.
     And now comes a curious circumstance.  Me experiments in Mexico City
in "making myself invisible" have been recorded with considerable detail;
and it will be remembered that I was far from satisfied with the results.
I had reached the "flickering" condition, but I had never succeeded in
"putting myself out" completely.
     But on this occasion --- when my unconscious self seems to have had me
in hand throughout --- I made myself invisible right enought.  The report
of the pistol, the screams (for all I know!) of the wounded or frightened
men, and the alarm given by the fugitives, had aroused the entire district.
An European was a rare bird in that quarter at that time of night; and no
native would be likely to have such a gun.  No doubt, too, the whole
assault had been watched from the beginning; and I must have been denounced
descriptively.  I remember clearly enough noting with a type of amusement
which I must really admit to having something "devilish" in its
composition, that the streets through which I passed were filled with
wildly excited crowds, all looking for me.  "But he, passing through the
midst of them, went his way."  I am aware that this sounds like a fish
story.  But as a matter of fact people who lived with me for the last three
years or so have noticed that I make myself invisible quite frequently, and
that (apparently) when I am not aware that I am doing so.
     There is a peculiar type of self-absorption which makes it impossible
for people to be aware of one.  In these recent cases, the observer who
could see me quite plainly because in sympathy with me, could also see that
the other people in the street --- or wherever it was --- could not see me
at all.  My theory is that the mental state in question distracts people's
attention from one automatically, as a conjurer does deliberately.  I can
transfer this property of invisibility, however, even to inanimate objects.
For instance, a police officer recently came to my house in search of a
certain thing which he named.  I admitted that I possessed it; I showed it
to him; I insisted on his seeing, smelling, tasting and touching it; but he
left the house and reported that he had been unable to find it.  In this
particular instance I knew what I was doing.  I deliberately overwhelmed
his mind with my earnestness in helping him and other objects of thought.
I cut the connecting link between his senses and his mind.
     But we digress.  I enjoyed lazily the splendour of the drowsy night as
I jogged along with lighted pipe --- never tobacco tasted better --- in the
broken-down old gharry up to Thornton's.

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     I had good reason to be proud.  I had been the butt of every gully at
school, I had suffered the agonies of knowing myself a coward and a
weakling.  My whole life seemed at times to be one vast and slimy
subterfuge to cozen death.
     Yet in the past month there had been a dozen outrages upon Europeans
in Calcutta, some of them culminating in the most brutal murder.  And I was
the only Englishman who had come out on top.  I had lost four rupees, eight
annas, it is true; but I had won the victory, one against six.
     Thornton was in bed when I arrived; but I had not hesitation in making
his "bera" admit me.  I told him my story and opened my revolver.  Then
only did I discover that my elaborate course of reasoning was entirely at
fault!  I had NOT monkeyed with the weapon and the hammer HAD been down on
the empty chamber as was right.  What had happened was that the first
cartridge had failed to explode; for there was the dent in the cap; once
again had nature, simple and sufficient, mocked the pomposity of the human
intelligence!
     Now, concluded I, hadn't I better go to the police and have these
ruffians rounded up?  Thornton was half asleep, but his mocking eye
expressed a more than godlike pity for my idiocy.  "Go to bed," he murmured
in his dreams; "come round after Chota Hazri in the morning and I'll take
you to the right man."  My indignation subsided.  I agreed.  I withdrew.  I
slept.  I bathed.  I breakfasted.  I went to Thornton.
     Thornton took me to a Scottish solicitor named MacNair.  I brought out
my indignation, its hair nicely brushed, and parted exactly in the middle.
MacNair remembered what his ancestors (who, at the time of the Flood, had a
boat of their ain) thought about caution.  "Go to Garth," was his
considered opinion.  Garth was one of the most brilliant barristers in
Calcutta.  I brought out my indignation again, but its hair got slightly
ruffled, and I am not sure but what there was a speck of dust on its
collar.  I protested violently that I wanted to go to the police.
     "Well," said Garth, "Curzon and Fraser are busy with the partition of
Bengal, for reasons of purely administrative convenience; and it is
singularly unfortunate that the measure will break the political power of
the Bengali into a lot of dirty little bits.  Their hearts bleed for
Bengal.  So, if you should have happened to hit somebody last night, they
will be very indignant and bring you to trial.  You will be instantly
acquitted, but they will invent some scheme for having you tried again, and
acquitted again, to show the sincerity of their love for the Bengali, whom
they are out to smash."
     "Then you advise me," I said innocently, "to say nothing?"  "Indeed
no," he said tempestuously, "as a sworn barrister, it is my duty to advise
you to report the whole affair immediately to the police."  I became more
innocent that ever.  "Well, I don't see how I can throw any light on the
matter.  (I was still ignorant of the effect, if any, of the shot.)

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     He bellowed with laughter.  "You can throw a whole flood of light on
it," he shouted.  My Quaker ancestors knocked at the door of my dull mind,
I suppose.  "Would you do it yourself?"  I asked meekly.  "Well,: he said
more soberly, "you'd be acquitted of course.  A man doesn't stroll out
after dinner to murder strangers.  But you'd be kept hanging about Calcutta
indefinitely; and an unscrupulous man, I'm afraid, might be tempted to hold
his tongue and clear our of British India p.d.q."
     My Quaker ancestors told me what to do.  I said sternly, but sadly,
"then I suppose it is my duty to go to the police at once.  Where is my
gharry?"  The great barrister wrong my hand in silent sympathy.
     But it has been one of the guiding principles of my life never to go
into a game unless there is a sporting chance.  It is silly to be tried for
murder if there is no possibility of conviction.  All the bubbles are gone
from the champagne.  So I waited two days more, still unaware whether my
shot had told, and went to meet my wife and child at the wharf.
     "How are you?" she exclaimed dramatically.  My prosaic reply was,
"You've got here just in time to see me hanged!"
     Thornton gave a dinner party in our honour that night.  My wife sat at
his right hand.  I saw that she was upset about something.  I had no
opportunity to talk to Thornon alone before dinner.  He kept on giving a
curious gesture and then raising two fingers.  My stupid mind could not
imagine what he was driving at.  After dinner he took me and Rose aside for
a moment.  The unimaginable had happened.  My single shot had gone clean
through the abdomen of the man with the knife and lodged in the spine of
the villain behind him.  They had been taken to hospital and made a full
confession of their crime.
     So the next morning the "Standard" gave me my meed of publicity.  Column
three of the main page gave the story of the attempted robbery.  The man
with the gun was thought to be a sailor from one of the ships in the
harbour; the police offered a reward for his apprehension.  Column five
contained an interview with the hero of the expedition to Kangchenjunga.
"They will go round the ships," said Thornton, "and they they'll have a
shot at the hotels.  Get out and get out quick!"
     "Darling sweetheart lovey-dovey silly great big she-ass!"  I whispered
to my wife, "would you rather walk across Persia or across China?"
     The wretched woman knew no geography.  All she knew about Persia was
rugs and Omar Khayyam; all she knew about China was opium smoking,
porcelain and tea.  She was fed up with Omar, who was at that time
deplorably the rage in this wasp-witted country.  "My ownest own," she
purred, "let's go through China!"  We hastily engaged an ayah for our baby.
This female was hideous, ill-mannered and untrustworthy; she claimed to be
a Roman Catholic so as to conceal that her caste would have nothing to do
with her,

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but she was the only ayah available, so off we went.  The one honest human
being in the party was dear old shikari Salama Tantra.  The loyal staunch
old hound!  He never flinched, he never failed; he had all the innocence of
a child and all the wisdom of Pythagoras; the courage to face the unknown
--- which Indians almost always fear to the limit --- and the gentleness
which goes with great strength of body and soul.  Peace be to thee, old
friend, where'er thou be.























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                              54


     The voyage to Rangoon was uneventful and delightful.  The weather was
perfect; for a wonder, the shores and spine of western Burma were on show.
There was a fearful fascination in those deadly beauties.  I cursed again
the fate that had driven me back in 1902 from the sombre slopes of the
Arakans.  I had rather I had left my bones to Bleach upon those
pestilential peaks.
     Yet my mind --- thanks be to the most high eternal gods! --- can never
rest for more than an albatross's glide upon the slopes of the past.
Today, writing my memories, I feel as if I were playing a sort of practical
joke upon myself.  I am hot on the trail of the future.  I can imagine
myself on my deathbed, spent utterly with lust to touch the next world,
like a boy asking for his first kiss from a woman.
     Beyond Burma lay mysterious China; I conjured up a cloud of amusing
phantasies.  Romance and adventure.  I am incurable; though I have had all
the good thinks of life, nearly all my life, though I no longer value them
or enjoy them for themselves, I still enjoy the idea of them.  I embrace
hardship and privation with ecstatic delight; I want everything that the
world holds; I would go to prison or to the scaffold for the sake of the
experience.  I have never grown out of the infantile belief that the
universe was made for me to suck.  I grow delirious to contemplate the
delicious horrors that are certain to happen to me.  This is the keynote of
my life, the untrammelled delight in every possibility of existence,
potential or actual.  Fear had been eliminated from me by the fact that I
look back with the keenest interest and pleasure to the events which at the
time were torture unassuaged.
     Imagine, then, how I gloried in the low of the silken waters about the
ship, in the fantastically immaterial outlines of the Arakan hills, in the
gloom of the gracious frondage of the forests, in the curves of the cobra
coast, in the sinister stories of wreck and piracy which haunt that
desolate abyss through which we were steaming, where for nine months of the
year one can scarce distinguish between sky and sea, so dark and damp is
the air, so subtly steaming the swell of ocean; while beyond, as in a
hashish dream, arose the highlands of china, provinces all but unknown even
to civilized Chinese themselves.  There, primrose to purple, was the
promise of undreamed-of tribes of men, strangely tattooed and dressed, with
awful customs and mysterious rites, beyond imagination and yet brutally
actual, folk with sublimity carven of simplicity and depravity woven of the
most complex madness.

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     I went toward China, my veins bursting with some colossal bliss that I
had never yet experienced.  I boiled with love for the unknown, the more so
that my brain was overcharged with grisly imaginings bred of Octave
Mirbeau's "Le Jardin des Supplices",  combined with fervid actualities born
of the feeling that I was (after all) treading, though reverently and afar
off, in the footsteps of my boyhood's hero, Richard Francis Burton.
     The approaches to Rangoon are of the most turbulent kind.  The river
is always the same violent angry dirty flood.  It seems to be desperately
annoyed with itself about something, possibly at having to pass through
Rangoon, which is a wretchedly provincial and artificial town, saved from
utter insignificance by one crowing glory, the Shwe Dagon pagoda.
     The Buddhists of Burma cannot be induced to do anything which might
contribute to their welfare or that of their religion; but they are
ridiculously lavish in building new dagobas or regilding old ones.  Shortly
before my arrival an immense sum of money had been collected to lay plate
of pure gold on the Htee of the Shwe Dagon, and while this operation was in
progress, a tigress indiscreetly walked into the city one night, climbed
the scaffolding and was shot by an Englishman.  The outrage to the
community, which objects to the slaying, even by accident, of an insect,
was causing serious political trouble.  Their most holy shrine defiled by
deliberate murder!  There was also considerable friction between the petty
English authorities and the Buddhist ponggis of European extraction who
were trying to settle in Rangoon, live the holy life and revive Buddhism as
a missionary religion.  European officials in a colony are necessarily
nuisances to themselves; the consequently try to pass it on to somebody
else, on the principle of school bullies --- the prototype of the
administration.
     I personally met with the greatest courtesy and kindness from the
authorities in Burma, but the country is not so settled socially as India,
and the climate is so abominable that there is every excuse for
irritability on the part of anyone unfortunate enough to have to live
there.  It is, however, a pity that the administration should look with
such provincial suspicion upon people like Allan Bennett, that they should
fancy political dangers when a European chooses to study native religion.
This disfavour extended to their own officials whenever they happened to
have sufficient intelligence to take a sympathetic interest in the people
and their customs and beliefs.  Fielding Hall, a judge, found himself quite
unpopular in official circles on account of his excellent though somewhat
sentimental book "The Soul of a People".
     The Englishman in all the colonies that I have visited, except in
India, which is not a colony, is childishly jealous of his supposed
superiority to the native.  He has convinced himself that he represents a
step ahead in evolution and he is fantastically afraid of "going fanti"; so
he has his knife into anyone who has a good word to say for the people.

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     Allan Bennett, by becoming a Buddhist monk, was a lining witness that
some Europeans thought Burmese beliefs better than their European
equivalents; and the idea --- so far as an idea may be ascribed to an
official --- was that native agitators might use this as an argument that
British rule in Burma was unjustified.  The whole ratiocination is an utter
muddle; but men are not governed by reason, either individually or
politically.  There is, therefore, some excuse for the anxiety of the
administration.
     At the same time, the example of India should have been enough.
British prestige in India rested on the real moral superiority of courage,
truthfulness, justice an self-control.  It has been destroyed by the
attempt to replace this irrational lever of iron by the rotten laths of
reason.  We should never have shown our weakness to the Indian student who
fills Bengal with the tale of his sexual conquest of white women, our
servant girls who took these sons of pettifoggers for princes.  We should
never have sent out middle-class pets-of-examiners to govern the
aristocratically minded inhabitants of the tongue of Asia.  Duxmia --- I
suspect some very wise bird --- wrote in "Vanity Fair" (October 13th, 1907):

          The British Empire was not built up by public school boys, for
     the excellent and all sufficient reason that while it was really being
     built up the public schools did not exist.  The men who defeated
     Napoleon and crushed the Indian Mutiny were sons of country squires,
     educated in private seminaries, or by tutors on their fathers' own
     estates, often left to run wild among grooms and stableboys, and
     obtaining their military or colonial posts through purchase or
     influence, certainly not through examinations.  And never let it be
     forgotten that the Navy, the one efficient service we possess, is
     officered by men who have not been to public schools.

     It is the plain truth.  Our new intellectual Y.M.C.A. snobbery has
sucked away our spinal marrow.
     I left my family in the hotel and went to stay with Allan, who had
been advanced from a simple bikkhu to a sayadaw in his choung (monastery)
some two miles from the city.  Thornton's remark about the discontinuity of
the ego had begun to take hold.  I was anxious to confer with my old guru
as thoroughly as possible.  His view at this time was that, no matter how
earnestly and skillfully one practised, one could not obtain Samadhi, and a
fortiori, Arhatship, unless one's Kamma (Karma) was, so to speak, ripe.
His theory was that one must comply with the Dhamma in all respects to give
oneself a chance, but to do so was no guarantee of success.  That depended
on coincidence.  His analogy was this:
     Suppose you are a point of a wheel and wish to touch a certain stone
on the road, it is obviously necessary to take up your position on the rim
of the

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wheel, bet even so you may be at the top of the wheel just at the moment
when the wagon passes over the stone.
     I said: "How does this doctrine differ from that of shir Parananda,
who said that Samadhi depended on 'the grace of the Lord Shiva'?"  He
smiled grimly and said that Shri Parananda's doctrine was not Buddhism!
     In any case, I resented those views.  I clung passionately to my
belief that a man's progress depended upon personal prowess.  No doubt this
is philosophically absurd, but I still maintain that it is practical good
sense.  The conversation, nevertheless, turned to considerations of what my
Kamma had in store for me.  "This might be discovered," he said, "by
acquiring the Magical Memory."  This is equivalent to Sammasati, Right
Recollection, the seventh step on the Noble Eightfold Path.  I must explain
what this means.
     The Buddhist theory of metempsychosis does not involve, like the
corresponding Hindu idea, the survival of the individual.  There is in fact
no ego to survive.  When a Buddhist says that he remembers the events of
his boyhood, he does not imply that he is the boy in question.  He is not;
nor is he the man, elephant, bat, hare or what-not of "his" previous
incarnation.  The wave that breaks on the shore is not composed of the same
particles of water as the "same" wave (as we call it) a minute earlier.
Incarnation are successive phenomena causally connected but not identical.
It would have been incorrect for the Buddha to say "I was that holy hare".
He should express the facts as follows:  There is a consciousness of a
tendency to perceive that holy hare and this man Gautama Buddha, as
collection of impressions in which the one partially determines the other.
This connection tends to produce the illusion of an ego whose experiences
include the phenomena associated, then with the hare, now with the Gautama.
     There are two main methods of acquiring the Magical Memory as defined
above.  One is to train the normal memory to work backwards instead of
forwards, so that any past action is presented to the mind after the manner
of a cinematograph film set running in the reverse direction.  (I never
succeeded fully in acquiring the technique of this method.)  The other is
to deduce from present circumstances those which gave rise to them.
     Just so, one may deduce from the examination of a position on a
chessboard what line of pay brought it about.  One could not be absolutely
sure; the pieces might have been set up by a madman; but granted that the
position is intelligible, the laws of probability make it as certain as
anything can be that it arose in a certain way.  Now in considering one's
life one has more material for investigation than a single position; one
has a series of successive positions.  Intelligent inquiry ought to be able
to deduce not only the unknown past, but the unknown future.  We have no
hesitation in reconstructing the boyhood of Swinburne --- presuming the
absence of

{463}





















direct information -- from his works.  His poetry proclaims that he studied
classics sympathetically and profoundly, that he was influenced by
pantheistic, anti-clerical and republican friends, and so on.
     Astronomers, again, observing an infinitesimally short section of the
course of a planet or star, confidentally pronounce on its position in the
past and the future, and even in some cases calculate its complete orbit.
There is therefore nothing a priori absurd in trying to discover one's own
nature, history and prospects, at least within very wide limits, from
careful consideration of one's known characteristics and environment.
"Explore the rivers of the soul," says Zoroaster, "whence and in what order
thou has come."  I saw that if I was to be intelligible to myself, I must
do so, and this resolution resulted in the critical events which made the
months of November, December, January and February the most important
period of my life so far as my personal attitude to myself and the universe
was concerned.
     His life as a bikkhu had not been too good for my guru.  The
abstinence from food after sunset is bad for the health, bit Allan found
that after three weeks he got into the habit.  But he was likely to be
haunted by the ghost of his dead appetite.  He had, moreover, got into a
very shocking state physically from lack of proper hygiene and perhaps also
of proper medical attention, as well as from his determination to carry out
the strict rules of the Order.  He had acquired a number of tropical
complaints.
     I felt that my poetry had been undergoing a transition and I was not
sure of my feet.  Allen told me that he thought the most magical line in
English was Coleridge's "And ice, mast high, went floating by."  The
comparison is not with mountains or cathedrals, though they are taller than
masts.  The imminence of the ice is expressed by the phrase chosen and the
reader is put upon the deck of a ship.  He becomes, maugre his teeth one of
the companions of the Ancient Mariner.
     This conversation led to my endeavouring to put a certain vividness of
phraseology into my poetry.  "The Eyes of Pharaoh" was my first attempt to
give vivid and immediate images.  I chose my similes so as to strengthen
the main theme.  Later in the month, at Mandalay, I wrote approximately
half of "Sir Palmede the Saracen".  The idea of this book was to five an
account of the Mystic Path in a series of episodes, and each episode was to
constitute a definite arrangement of colour and form.  Thus, Section I
shows the blue and yellow of sea and sand, a knight in silver armour riding
along their junction to a point where an albatross circles round a
mutilated corpse.
     One further subject remained for discussion.  I had it in my mind to
put spiritual research on a scientific basis.  The first step was to get
mankind to agree on a language.  Allan maintained that a perfectly adequate
terminology existed already in the Abhidhamma, the metaphysical section of
the Buddhist

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canon.  I could not deny the excellence of his intention, but from the
point of view of the average Western student, the terms are so jawbreaking
as to be heartbreaking.  I said: We already possess a universal language
which does not depend on grammar.  The fundamentals of mathematics are the
basis of the Holy Cabbala.  It is natural and proper to represent the
cosmos, or any part of it, or any operation of it, or the operation of any
part of it, by the symbols of pure mathematics.
     On November 15th we started up the Irrawaddy by the steamship "Java" and
reached Mandalay on the twenty-first.  I spent my days and nights leaning
over the rail, watching the wavelets of the great river and the flyingfish.
I became insane.  There I was, lean, stern, brown and immobile; and there
was a set of disconnected phenomena, each with a sufficient reason in
itself, and the whole of them uniting to produce another phenomenon; but
there was no connection between one set of reasons and the other.  Each
wavelet was caused by certain physical conditions and the effect of the
total was to slow down the revolution of the earth.  But neither the so-
called transitory, nor the so-called permanent, phenomenon was ultimately
intelligible.  Further, what I called "I" was simply a machine which
recorded the impact of various phenomena.
     I wrote, "About now I may count my speculative criticism of the reason
as not only proved and understood, but realized."  And the following day,
"the misery of this is simply sickening; --- I can write no more."  The
influence of the river journey itself had something to say to this.  It is
a vast implacable flood.  The tangled forests on the banks seem like a
symbol of disorder, desolation and disease.  Religion itself becomes
offensively monotonous.  On every point of vantage are pagodas --- stupid
stalagmites of stagnant piety.  There is only one dagoba with any pretence
to beauty.  The eccentricity is explained thus.  Even the atrophied
ambition of architects had become sick of perpetual plagiarism.  The
contractor went to the queen and asked how he should build it.  She
extruded one of her breasts and said, "Take that for a model."  He did so,
and the result is a refreshing relief from the routine of the regular
dagoba.
     But the prevailing impression is one of putrefaction.  Moored to the
steamer were flats piled with fish.  The sun rotted them to the point when
they became unfit for food.  The stench was incomparable; it somehow fitted
with the state of my soul.  At mandalay I exhibited this state by this
entry in my diary, "Saw palace and 450,001,293,847 pagodas."  The criticism
is unjust: I had not counted them.  There is, however, one good pagoda in
the city, the Arrakan, and there is one really beautiful Buddha Rupa.  It
is said that this statue is the only one which is a portrait of Gautama
from life.  This may or may not by; at least it is free from the sickening
conventionality of the regular smirking stupidity.  The real glory of
Mandalay consists of the

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tables of the law.  There are ten thousand slabs engraved with the canon,
each under a canopy to protect it from the weather.  I thought I had done
rather well in the matter of book production, but I had to admit I was
sitting with jack high against a royal flush.
     Mandalay is ghastly most of the year.  It is practically under water
all the summer.  At least fifty per cent of the European residents are on
the sick list and a goodly proportion of these die outright.  There is
little to choose between the Irrawaddy basin and the worst parts of West
Africa.
     Yet the dwellers thereof talked as if they were in a health resort
whenever the Salween valley was mentioned by some intrepid spirit.  This
was encouraging, as my main objective involved crossing the Salween.  The
map had fascinated me.  The Salween, the Mekong and the Yangtze Kiang run
parallel for a considerable distance and they are so near together that it
only took me three days between the first two of these rivers; yet the
first reaches the sea at Moulmein, in the Gulf of Martaban, the second
below Bangkok in the Gulf of Siam, with the whole of the Malay peninsula
between them, while the third turns suddenly from south to north of east
and reaches the Yellow Sea thousands of miles away.  The "divides" or
watersheds between these three rivers during their dramatic parallelism
must evidently be mountains of the most interesting type.  I wanted to
visit a corner of the earth which appealed thus vividly to my imagination.
     Incidentally, there were practical difficulties.  I had at this time
no notion that everybody was a perfect idiot.  I could not understand the
parochial psychology of the average Englishman.  Even Litton, the British
counsul at Tengyueh, wrote, "I will say frankly that I had no idea that
Mrs. Crowley or a child would be with you, and that while there is really
no reason why they should not go to Yunnanfu, along the main road, they
will, I fear, suffer a good deal of discomfort and inconvenience on the
road from the inquisitiveness and impertinence of the Chinamen: which will
try your temper.  I would also recommend you to dress in Chinese style, and
if Mrs. Crowley would not object to a Chinese lady's upper garment or
jacket, she would attract much less attention and be less subject to
annoyance."
     I did not in the least understand that the average Englishman actually
resents being asked to sleep in a bedroom which has not been furnished in
the Tottenham Court Road, and has not not and cold water laid on.  I did
not understand that his fears invariably cause him to interpret the natural
curiosity of villagers who have never seen Europeans in their lives, as
insolence and hostility.  I did not understand that he regarded it
incumbent on him to instruct the population who have been highly civilized
for thousands of years in the rudiments of politeness and morality, to say
nothing of religion.  I knew, as I know that two and two make four, that it
is only necessary to behave like a gentleman in order to calm the
apprehensions

{466}



















of the aborigines and to appeal to the fundamental fact that all men are
brothers.  By this I do not mean anything stupid, sodden and sentimental; I
mean that all men equally require food, clothing and shelter, in the first
place; and in the second, security from aggression in respect of life and
property.
     Litton himself understood and appreciated the Chinese character
perfectly.  Though he was only the counsul of the most remote town of the
most remote province of the most remote empire on earth, he ruled that
whole province by the sheer strength of the superiority conferred by
sympathy, integrity and moral courage.  But his experience had not led him
to expect that any other Englishman's character could coincide with his own
at all these critical points.
     The irritability and insularity of the Englishman, with his
snobbishness, pomposity and cant, had established a prejudice on the part
of the authorities against allowing Englishmen to visit the interior of
China.  My countrymen could be relied upon to make mischief out of the most
unpromising materials.  Therefore, while the government of France
encouraged its citizens to explore the province, Whitehall made it as
difficult as possible for Britons.  I got my permission only after
senseless delay and encompassed by ridiculous restrictions.
     On November 23rd I went on board the "Irrawaddy" for Bhamo, but for one
cause or another she did not leave Mandalay till the twenty-ninth.  There
are two defiles to be passed.  The river is constructed by outcrops of rock
so as to form rapids so dangerous as to be navigable only with extreme
caution.  I reached Bhamo on December 1st.
     The Irrawaddy is the scene of one of the most exciting commercial
gambles of the world.  At the head of the waters are mines of jade, and
huge blocks of the crude mineral are shipped on rafts to merchants lower
down.  These blocks are bought by auction.  It may almost be said that the
purchaser relies on his clairvoyance, for there is no scientific means of
determining what will happen when the block is split.  The purchaser
proceeds to split it and takes his loss or profit accordingly.  The process
is then repeated as the jade goes down the river.  By the time it reaches
Rangoon, it has been cut up into small sections an its ultimate value is
approximately determined.  During its transit fortunes have been made or
lost.
     Though the upper river passes through hilly country, it still signals
its sinister message of decay and death.  A dramatic incident had stamped
the fact on my memory.  On the steamer was an old man, a distinguished
official who had intended to retire from the service and take his pension a
month or two before.  He had been personally requested by the lieutenant
governor to postpone his return to England that he might facilitate the
arrangements for the visit of the Prince of Wales.  The conversation of
Europeans in these parts

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of the earth is inexpressibly morbid; they seem obsessed by the ever
present probability of death.  The official tried to conceal his panic by
loudly asserting a medical theory of his own, that plague, cholera,
dysentery and typhoid (the four princes of the blood royal in the palace of
King Death) were merely varieties of malarial fever.  I said scornfully,
"Next time you get cholera, I hope they'll give you quinine."  The joke
came three days later, when he died of cholera.  I do not know whether they
gave him quinine or not.
     Bhamo is a delightful outpost.  One is outside the malarial stewing of
the jungle.  But I got to hate it, as I wanted to proceed to China, and was
held up for seventeen days by the non-arrival of my passport.  The delay
was partly deliberate.  The deputy commissioner was absent; and his
assistant was an Eurasian, who took the greatest delight in annoying the
white man.  I ultimately got leave to proceed over his head, and having
done so rubbed it in with the following letter:

          16.12.05                             "Dak Bungalow, Bhamo"
     Dear Sir,
          In response to your thoughtful suggestion (conveyed in your
     favour of yesterday's date), I did myself the honour of presuming to
     enter into telegraphic communication with H.B.M. Consul at Tengyueh.
     I will being to your notice, with your kind permission, my intention
     to leave Bhamo tomorrow in consequence o the information thus
     conveyed; but I will refrain from agitating you with other portions of
     his communication.
          These, though, I suspect, will sooner or later be brought before
     you by His Honour the Lieutenant governor of Burma; and I trust that
     you will extend to this gentleman's observations the same prompt
     courtesy and intelligent attention which you have hitherto been
     graciously pleased to condescend to bestow upon mine.
          I must overwhelm myself in due expressions of gratitude for the
     untiring pains you have so willing given yourself on my behalf, and
     trust that efforts so unintermitted have had no prejudicial effect
     upon your constitution.
          I am sure that you have thoroughly enjoyed yourself, virtue being
     its own reward, and I am sure I can express no more welcome good wish
     than that fate may soon send you another real white man to treat you
     as you have treated me.
          I have the honour to be, Dear Sir,
                                                 Saint E. A. Crowley
          The Assistant Commissioner, Bhamo

I am not a snob or a puritan, but Eurasians do get on my nerves.  I do not

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believe that their universally admitted baseness is due to a mixture of
blood or the presumable peculiarity of their parents; but that they are
forced into vileness by the attitude of both their white and coloured
neighbours.  A similar case is presented by the Jew, who really does only
too often possess the bad qualities for which he is disliked; but they are
not proper to his race.  No people can show finer specimens of humanity.
The Hebrew poets and prophets are sublime.  The Jewish soldier is
courageous, the Jewish rich man generous.  The race possesses imagination,
romance, loyalty, probity and humanity in an exceptional degree.
     But the Jew has been persecuted so relentlessly that his survival has
depended on the development of his worst qualities; avarice, servility,
falseness, cunning and the rest.  Even the highest-class Eurasians such as
Ananda Koomaraswamy suffer acutely from the shame of being considered
outcast.  The irrationality and injustice of their neighbours heightens the
feeling and it breeds the very abominations which the snobbish inhumanity
of their fellow-men expects of them.
     With the departure from Bhamo may be said to begin a new phase of my
career.  Up to this point, I have been able to interweave the strands of my
three lives; the lives of the soul, the mind and the body; or, more
accurately, in the language of the Cabbala, the Neschamah, the Ruach and
the Nephesch.  The Hebrew sages have made an admirably simple, significant
and accurate classification.
     The Neschamah is that aspiration which in most men is no more than a
void and voiceless longing.  It become articulate only when it compels the
Ruach to interpret it.  The Nephesch, or animal soul, is not the body
itself; the body is excremental, of the Qliphoth or shells.  The Nephesch
is that coherent brute which animates it, from the reflexes to the highest
forms of conscious activity.  These again are only cognizable when they
translate themselves to the Ruach.
     The Ruach lastly is the machine of the mind converging on a central
consciousness, which appears to be the ego.  The true ego is, however,
above Neschamah, whose occasional messages to the Ruach warn the human ego
of the existence of his superior.  Such communications maybe welcomed or
resented, encouraged or stifled.  Initiation consists in identifying the
human self with the divine, and the man who does not strain constantly to
this end is simply a brute made wretched and ashamed by the fact of
selfconsciousness.
     I find by experience that this theory represents the facts very
closely.  I thought it necessary to give at least the bare skeleton,
because the next months of our story compel me.  It is no longer possible
to interweave my three lives.  My ordinary career becomes a welter of
strange adventures, some of the most uncanny kind; yet the spiritual life
is all-important and

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absolutely simple.  The one is linked to the other only by the fact that my
adventures appear as if they were so many obstacles deliberately put in the
way of my performing the Operation of the Sacred Magick of Abra-Melin the
Mage.  I shall deal first with the life of the senses.



























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                              55


     It is probably a rare incident for any young man to meet, in the
flesh, the ideal of his boyhood's dreams.  Such, however was my great good
fortune.  In the consul at Tengyueh, Mr. Litton, I found all that I had
lost when Richard Burton died.  He possessed the spirit of adventure in its
noblest and most joyous form.  He had the instinct for learning foreign
languages and dealing with foreign people; and in one respect, his history
had been similar.  Some years before, he had been consul in another part of
China which was the heart of the Boxer movement.  Moving, as he did, among
the Chinese in the most intimate way, he understood the feeling behind the
agitation.  He employed his genius in unravelling the conspiracy an
succeeded in discovering the plans of the Boxers in detail.  This
information he communicated to the authorities in Peking.  It will be
remembered that Burton did exactly the same thing in the matter of the
Indian Mutiny; and to a certain extent, Sir William Butler had done this
with regard to the Boers.
     The result in each case was exactly the same.  The indignant
authorities banished Litton to the remote and unimportant post of Tengyueh,
at the very edge of the wildest province of China.  But it is hard to keep
a good man down.  Litton's influence over the natives was so great that he
was the real ruler of the province.  He was just starting on tour to
compose some native squabble near the frontier, some thirty miles from
Tengyueh; and we lunched together by the wayside.  He had done miracles to
smooth my path.
     He had been originally alarmed by my taking my wife and child with me
on such a journey.  His letter amused me very much; it showed the class of
the English people with whom he was expected to deal.  He expected us to
scream if hot water and cold water was not laid on in every Chinese inn,
and to take down every Chinese coolie, farmer or merchant for a murderer
with a special "down" on "foreign devils".  He thought the we would be very
much upset by that natural curiosity of the natives at seeing a white woman
and interpret their interest as intentional insult.  When he found with
what practical common sense I travelled, he realized immediately that there
was going to be no trouble.  During this lunch he gave me more genuinely
valuable information about China that I had had in the whole previous
course of my life.  One of his sayings was this: whatever one hears,
however extraordinary, is true in China somewhere or other!
     He also told me the main psychological difference between the Chinese
and Indian as regards practical dealing with them.  The Chinese does not

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respect the white man as the Indian does --- for his possession of high
moral qualities.  The very coolies despise their wealthiest merchants for
their honesty, which, by the way, is unique in commerce.  They respect any
man who acts as their own mandarins act; with absolute lack of sympathy,
justice or any other human feelings.  They treat the traveler well in
proportion as he is overbearing, haughty and avaricious.
     I found, in fact, that it was necessary to throw the whole of my
previous principles overboard.  One cannot fraternize with the Chinese of
the lower classes; one must treat them with absolute contempt and
callousness.  On the other hand the Chinese gentleman is the noblest and
courtliest in the world.  His general bearing is that of Athos in "The Three"
"Musketeers," at his best.  One's relations with him should be those of
absolute mutual respect; and here again, intimacy of any kind is
impossible.  Each man abides on pinnacles of isolation.  A typical case is
the relation of the Emperor to a man like Li Hung-chang.  The Son of Heaven
was so far above even the greatest of his subjects that he could make no
difference between him and the commonest labourer.  He wrote to him simply
as Li.
     Litton furnished me with careful notes of the stages of my journey to
Yunnanfu, which I found extremely useful.  I could not start from Tengyueh
until my passport arrived from the consulate general.  With extreme
kindness, Litton invited me to stay at the consulate until it arrived.  He
himself hoped to be back in Tenjyueh within a week, so that I expected to
see him again and learn more of his vision.  We sat and talked for a couple
of hours, each feeling instinctively that he had found a sympathetic
spirit.
     The march from Bhamo to Tengyueh had been rater eventful.  The first
day was a pleasant ride of about nine miles to Mamouk where we dined at the
officers' mess.  We were still in the Burmese atmosphere and the minds of
the people were preoccupied with European affairs and disease.  There was
no trace of the singular horror with which I was to come in contact beyond
the frontier, a horror from which I found no one but Litton himself
entirely free, until I got into the sphere of French influence.  The next
day we covered twenty-one miles and the third sixteen, where we camped for
the first time in the open.  The scenery had not been particularly
striking; but there was a feeling of openness on leaving the Irrawaddy
basin which we found extremely pleasant.
     On the fourth day we crossed the Chinese frontier.  At this point it
is marked by a small stream in a ravine.  There is not proper bridge; only
an insecure-looking tree trunk.  I had doubts about my pony and decided to
walk across.  I was of course riding last to prevent straggling, and by the
time I had crossed the stream the rest of the party were out of sight
around the corner of the path which rises sharply along the hillside, in
order to cross the mountain.  I had got a little stiff with riding and
thought I would stretch my

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legs; so I walked with my horse up the slope for some distance.  Deciding
to remount, I swung my leg over the saddle; and, before I was seated, the
brute put his hind hoof over the khud, which was here precipitious.  We
rolled over each other twice, a distance of thirty or forty feet.
     We were neither of us in the least hurt; my feeling was one of plain
astonishment.  I look up at the cliff.  It was well within my posers to
climb, but there was no possibility of getting the pony up.  I climbed up
the path and carefully retied my turban, which had come off, before
shouting for Alama to come back and extricate my horse.  I felt it
essential to show myself imperturbable.  The men returned to find me
quietly sitting and smoking.  They had considerable difficulty in find a
way round for the pony.  The day's adventures were not yet over.  Just
before getting to camp I was kicked on the thigh by a mule.  I shall
explain later the extreme importance of this day in my career.
     There was quite a series of small accidents during these days.  Salama
had started it by falling off his mule.  Then came my turn.  The day after,
Rose and the baby fell while walking across a bridge, quite
incomprehensibly.  It was extraordinary luck that they did not come to
serious grief.  The day after, we spent the night in a Buddhist temple
after a march in the pouring rain, during which the ayah was both kicked
and bitten by a mule.  The day after that it was again my turn to be
kicked.  I have had a good deal of experience with mules in various parts
of the world; but only in this short section did such things occur.
     This day was again very wet.  The road led over a pass three thousand
feet high.  I say "road", and of course this is the main highway from Burma
to China, just as the road we had followed from Srinagar is the main
highway from Kashmir to Turkestan.  In neither case would it be considered
good going by the average goat.  The day we were to arrive in Tengyueh, the
ayah gave us the slip.  We had camped by a hot spring the night previous,
in company with a caravan bound for Burma.  One of the muleteers took the
fancy of the lady and she decided to throw in her lot with his and go off
to Burma.  She had been such a bad servant and given so much trouble that I
made no attempt to retrieve her.
     We met with a warm welcome at the consulate from Litton's Chinese
wife, an exceedingly beautiful woman with perfect manners.  They had five
charming children.  The prejudice against half-castes requires analysis.
It is not the mixture of blood, as a rule, that makes the majority of them
such degraded specimens of humanity, but the circumstances usually
attending their birth.  These circumstances, again, are due to the crass
imbecility of public morality.  When the child is a by-blow of drunken
Tommy and a bazaar woman there is no need of profound anthropological
hypotheses to explain why it is not a Newton or a Chesterfield.  There is
no doubt, however,

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that some races make better combinations than others.  The best class of
Englishman and the best class of Chinese mingle admirably, provided (of
course) that the children are brought up decently in an environment where
they are not handicapped from the first by feeling themselves objects of
dislike and contempt. Nothing is worse for children than to be humiliated;
they should be brought up to realize that they are "kings and priests unto
God".
     The foreign colony at Tengyueh was small and dull.  The head of the
customs was Napier, the son of an old friend of my father's.  He was a
melancholy aristocrat who only kept himself from going insane in these
monotonously uncongenial surroundings by a sort of Promethean courage.  The
other Britons have made no impression on my mind soever.  There was a
Norwegian missionary named Amundsen, even more colourless and doleful than
brainless Scandinavians usually are.  The doctor was a Bengali named Ram
Lal Sircar, a burly nigger of the most loathsome type.  I am not fond of
Benaglis at the best and he as the worst specimen of his race I have ever
seen.  He was fat and oily, with small piglike treacherous eyes.  On the
rare occasions when he was not eating, he was writing anti-British articles
for the Bengal native press.
     There was, however, a guest at the consulate with whom I struck up an
immediate warm friendship.  This was a botanist named George Forrest, who
was recuperating from an adventure which I must narrate in some detail, as
it includes one of the most striking ghost stories I ever heard.  His happy
hunting ground had been the Mekong-Salween divide.  He had been north
beyond the twenty-eighth parallel, in country practically untraversed by
any whites, among mountains which rose to nineteen thousand feet.  His
headquarters was a Jesuit mission.
     The district had been disturbed for some time; a comparatively
important town was the centre of a small revolt against the Chinese
government.  An army had been disatched to reduce it.  The siege was
typically Chinese.  Having invested the town, the imperial general made no
attempt to take it by assault; he simply entered into negotiations with the
garrison as to the price of the surrender.  After interminable haggling, a
sum was fixed.  So much is intelligible, but at this point the baffling
psychology of the Chinese comes into play.  The inhabitants were put to the
sword and the town sacked, exactly as if it had been taken as the result of
murderous conflicts.
     The general weakening of the imperial authority led to the outbreak of
raids on the part of the Buddhist lamas who lived in remote serais perched
upon the inaccessible crags of the mountains bordering Tibet.  Bands of
these monks swept down from their fastnesses to indulge in orgies of
rapine, rape, murder and cannibalism.  (The official descriptions of the
various hells in the Buddhist canon are of course actual pictures of fact;
the tortures of the damned

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are simply slight exaggerations of those actually inflicted by Buddhists on
their enemies.  In particular, it was the custom of these lamas to devour
the hearts and livers of their enemies in order to acquire their vitality
and courage.  As I have already explained, I do not regard this as
superstitious; I think it is practical common sense.)
     Forrest was at the Jesuit mission when word came from the north that
the lamas were on the war path.  It was decided to flee and the entire
mission hurried off.  Its eldest member, Father Bernard, was a man over
eighty.  It was decided to separate for greater safety; but Forrest found
it very hard to bring himself to leave the old man, for whom he had
acquired extreme respect and affection.  However, it was the only thing to
do, and Forrest plunged off alone into an obscure side valley hoping to
reach the comparative safety of the main road from Tengyueh to Yunnanfu by
means of a detour.
     The nightfall of the second day showed him the camp fires of the lamas
on the hills to the south and he recognized that he was cut off.  In the
light of the fires he could see the gigantic silhouettes of their hounds.
He suddenly realized that his European boots made it easy to track him, so
he discarded them.  During the day, the slightest movement might easily be
observed, or the hounds might be on his track, so he spent it under a rock
which overhung the river, up to his neck in the icy water.  When night
fell, he crawled out and tried to get some warmth into his body.  (His food
soon failed him.  During this adventure he lived for eight days on nothing
at all and for the twenty-one following on tsampa, Tibetan flour, which has
the property of producing violent diarrhoea in the average European.)
     Night came on utterly black and Forrest was suddenly aware of a
luminous figure standing beside him.  He recognized it immediately as that
of Father Bernard.  He thought to himself, "They have caught and killed
him!"  (This was subsequently verified.  The old man met his end earlier on
that day.)  The phantom did not speak, but its right arm was outstretched
as if to urge Forrest to seek refuge in that direction.  Forrest laughed to
himself, despite the atrocious circumstances, at the absurdity; the
direction indicated was the one of all others which was most certainly
fatal to take.  After a few minutes the figure disappeared.  Dawn broke and
showed him the situation unchanged.  He passed a second day in the water
under the rock.
     The second night the spectre reappeared.  Again he pointed in the same
direction and this time the gesture was imperious.  Forrest's instinct of
self-preservation had been practically worn out by hardship.  "Oh well," he
said to himself, "a quick death is better than this," and off he went in
the direction designated.  He had not gone far before he fell in with a
countryman who offered to help him to escape, and led him, barefoot as he
was, across a snow-covered pass over fifteen thousand feet high.  The met
no lamas and

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eventually reached the main road, where Forrest fell in with a caravan of
merchants travelling to Tengyueh, who treated him well and had him carried
to the consulate, where I hound him, still weak from his adventure and
still shaken in nerve.  He told his story with the utmost modesty and
equanimity; and I could not doubt that the apparition of Father Bernard was
a fact.  That it should have pointed out the way of salvation in the most
unlikely direction certainly indicated supernormal knowledge.
     The atmosphere at Tengyueh was intensely oppressive.  The conversation
invariably turned upon battle, murder and sudden death, embroidered with
fantastic wealth of disease and torture.  It was an absolute nightmare.  I
really take great credit to myself for having spent twenty-five days in
this community without losing my nerve or becoming obsessed.  Everyone
seemed to be preoccupied with the idea that at any moment the Chinese might
break out and put us all to the most cruel death.
     I must admit that there was a quite unusual number of really
terrifying incidents; even trifling occurrences seemed too apt to take on a
sinister significance.  For instance, two of Litton's horses died suddenly.
I diagnosed anthrax and wanted to take the obvious measures; but there was
nothing to be done.  The servants at the consulate had taken the carcasses
to the market and spent the next three days in janging for them.  To hang
is to haggle; but the most inveterate haggler is a fixed price merchant in
comparison.  It was certainly the limit to think of the animals being sold
for human food!  One must be resolute to prevent one's mind from dwelling
on such subjects; one must take one's precautions so far as possible
without thinking about the threatened calamity.
     Another disquieting incident was as follows.  Tengyueh was supposed to
be ion direct telegraphic communication with Peking.  One of the most
absurdly characteristic arrangements was that the observatory at Peking
telegraphed to us daily the correct time.  Now at Yunchang there was a
relay and, as often as not, the telegraphists would be engaged in smoking
opium for three or four days at a time.  Consequently a whole bunch of
telegrams would arrive late one evening telling us that it was noon at
Peking.
     One was therefore not very sure of getting the news.  And just about
this time a message came though telling us of the riots in Shanghai and
that seventeen people had been killed.  We could not tell how serious this
might he; whether it was a local outbreak or whether it was part of a
general antiforeign rising.  I heard later the details.  The European
colony had been badly scared and fortified themselves in the country club;
but the riot fizzled out.  It was none the less alarming to get an isolated
item of news of this kind.  Thinking of it today, I wonder that it never
occurred to me to go back to Burma.  I did not feel either courageous about
it or alarmed.  There is in me a quality of almost imbecile stoicism.  I
simply cannot be bothered to worry

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about danger or hardship of any kind unless it is force on my immediate
notice.
     I cannot account for this peculiar imperturbability.  It seems
entirely at war with my extreme sensitiveness.  And yet it may indeed be
the Freudian protection against this; it may be that my instincts warn me
that if I allow myself to think at all on certain subjects the pain will be
unendurable.  However that may be, there is no doubt that I possess a
peculiar solidity; having decided to do anything, I go on my course no
matter what new facts arise.  I will not go a step out of my path of avoid
the most obvious unpleasantness.  And I have certainly never been able to
make up my mind whether this quality is an advantage in the long run or no.
     The final episode of my story at Tengyueh might indeed have caused
most men to change their plan.  It is in many ways the most dramatic
adventure of my life and has left an ineradicable impression on my mind.  I
despair of describing its intensity or the wildness of the setting.  The
oppressively electric atmosphere of the previous three weeks, the
indescribable apprehension which hung over the colony, suddenly discharged
itself in a thunderbolt.
     At eight p.m. on January 10th we were sitting at dinner in the
consulate when we heard confused cries and flying footsteps in the
courtyard.  The doors were suddenly flung open and a gigantic runner
dripping with sweat came crashing into the room, sprawling his gaunt arms
and legs in the extravagance of his gestures.  For a moment we believed
that an attack was imminent but Forrest soon elicited a somewhat vague
story to the effect that Litton was ill and required the services of a
doctor.  He was said to be camped at about two days' march away in the
direction of Bhamo; but we resolved to cover the distance in the course of
the night.  Forrest being my senior, and knowing the language, was
evidently marked as chief of the expedition.  I put myself unreservedly at
his orders.
     The first thing was to get the horses, which was easy; the second to
rout out the Bengali, which was an entirely different proposition.  It was
after nine o'clock before he joined us at the outskirts of the town.  The
word forward was given, and Forrest and I galloped furiously into the
darkness.  We kept up a tremendous pace as far as the foot of the hills.
It was a wild and windy night; torn clouds scudded fitfully across a misty
moon.  Some rain had fallen and the broad smooth stones of the road were as
slippery as glass.  It was impossible to ride on the slopes; the tatu
stumbled at every step.
     My mountain boots with their wrought iron nails proved equally
awkward.  I was forced to march, supporting myself with one hand on the
pony's neck and urging him with my whip with the other.  We pressed on
eagerly through the night; and at last we came to the crest of the ridge
and began to run down the other side of the path towards the hot springs.
There was just sufficient light in the east to reveal the landscape by the
time we got

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near the foot of the hill.  Then I saw a litter slowly approaching.
Forrest gave a shout and dashed enthusiastically forward; but I silently
turned my horse, for I saw that the consul's legs were tied.
     The situation, apart from its tragic present, was full of anxiety for
the future.  How had Litton died!  A glance at the body was not reassuring.
There were symptoms which suggested poison and the least sinister
alternative was some deadly infection.  I wanted a medical opinion; but the
doctor avoided the neightbourhood of the litter, saying that the
examination could be made at Tengyueh.  I did not fully realize what was
behind this and acquiesced.  He hurried back much faster than he had come.
For all I knew, he had it in his mind to make various preparations.
     About four o'clock we reached a wretched hamlet where some coolies had
kindled a fire in the street.  The bearers of the litter, utterly fagged
out, threw themselves down by the fire.  There was some loose straw lying
about and Forrest and I followed their example.  We tried to learn the
circumstances of Litton's death; but the men gave vague and apparently
contradictory accounts of what had happened.  It was awkward; some of them
might have been in a conspiracy; and we had no means of telling its purport
or extent.  I snatched a few moments of that uneasy slumber which
supervenes upon exhaustion and distress, and dulls while it does not rest
the nerves.
     We started again at about half-past six and reached Tengyueh at about
ten o'clock.  We had allowed the litter to precede us, thinking that the
doctor would be in waiting, having made all arrangements, but we hound that
nothing of the sort had been done.  The coolies had simply dumped the body
in the outer courtyard of the consulate.  We hat it taken into an empty
room on the opposite side of that in which people were living and sent
round for the doctor.  He returned an evasive answer.
     After several further messages, Forrest lost patience and asked me to
go round and bring him back by force if necessary.  It must not be supposed
that Forrest was in any way hysterical.  It was immediately urgent to
ascertain the cause of Litton's death.  The safety of the European
community might depend on it.  If he had died by violence, our one chance
might be for troops to be rushed up for our protection; if by disease, to
take quarantine measures.
     I found the Bengali seated at his table before a plate of rice such as
I have never seen in my life.  There was certainly enough for six average
people.  I stayed a few moments to watch the process of deglutition.  It
was well worth seeing;  and from the debris on the table, it was clear that
this was merely a little light dessert.  I did not lose my temper; but I
must confess to being very angry.  I asked him to come round and he then
began to try to get out of it altogether.  I soon saw hat he had made up
his mind that the consul had died of some dangerously infectious disease
and was solely preoccupied with keeping himself out of danger.

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     Persuasion and reproach failing to reach him, I resorted to the use of
my whalebone cutting-whip.  He made no attempt to ward off the blows, still
less to tackle me; he simply cowered and howled.  I stopped at intervals to
impress upon his mind that I intended to go on until he came with me to do
his duty.  He ultimately gave in and I drove him down the street to the
consulate.  But once in the chamber of death, it was still impossible to
get him to make a proper examination.  He would not approach the body.
Forrest and I cut off the clothes.
     There were some curious wounds caused, in my judgment, by the attempts
of some of the coolies to relieve the symptoms.  They were none of them
serious in themselves.  The main visible symptom was large patches of
extravasated blood.  The doctor refused point blank to make a post-mortem
and said he would give his certificate that death was due to erysipelas.
He then bolted.  His next act was to remember that erysipelas was a
notifiable infectious disease and that therefore his best course was to
find my wife and child, and endeavour to communicate it if possible.
Luckily she had sufficient sense to keep herself and the baby out of his
way.
     Only one thing was needed to put the lid on.  When Forrest and I had
done what was necessary, we proceeded to disinfect ourselves before
rejoining the rest.  The missionary Amundsen rushed up to us in great
excitement and called our attention to an illustrated newspaper which he
had just received.  "Look," he cried, "there is the Norwegian royal
family!"
     We buried Litton the following day.
     The next business was to get off.  My permission had arrived, but I
was told that I must engage an interpreter.  I should have been only too
glad to have one; but I might as well have looked for a snowball in hell.
Eventually they dug up a person named Johnny White.  He was the first
Chinese with whom I had been in direct permanent connection; and I was
highly amused to discover that his Chinese name had been Ah Sin.  He had
been brought up from infancy at the Wesleyan Mission at Mandalay.  As a
servant he had the defect that he was continually drunk on arrack and
opium.  As an interpreter, one, he spoke no Chinese; two, he spoke no
English.  It was with the utmost pain that I was able to communicate with
him at all.  I cross-examined him, of course very severely, as to his
religion.  It took a long time for him to grasp my meaning; but ultimately
he reassured me as to his creed, which was this: "John Wesley all same
God."  He was so besotted with drink and drugs that his human qualities, if
he ever possessed any, were completely in abeyance.  His name was soon
corrupted into "Janwar" --- which is Hindustani for "wild animal".
     The journey to Yunnanfu was unique in my life in one important
respect.  I became richer as I went along --- by the simple process of
spending my money!  It was impossible to get a change of silver except at
one or two

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points.  I carried the bulk of my money in copper cash.  (Everyone knows
the coins with the square holes.)  These furnished loads for two men.  I
must explain the financial status of this part of the world.  Silver money
had no denomination, but was valued by weight, and the "coinage" consisted
of lumps of silver, whose purity was guaranteed by its shape.  The bulkier
kind was something like a houseboat, some three inches long and between one
and two in the other dimensions.  The other kind was not unlike a tortoise
and its surface had a peculiar striation.  Thus there were these lumps of
silver identified as the products of the imperial mint.
     Now, there was a varying relation (rate of exchange) between a certain
weight of this silver and a string of cash.  A string consisted nominally
of a hundred cash; but these were what was called market cash.  A certain
number of cash counted as a hundred for all commercial purposes and this
number varied with the district.  Now, as it happened, this number was
constantly decreased all the way to Yunnanfu, so that if I wished to buy
something at Tengyuen for a hundred cash I had to hand over a string
containing eighty-nine coins, whereas a similar transaction at Talifu
required only seventy odd, and near Yunnansen forty-six if I remember
right.  I was consequently always having to take off coins from my original
strings.  The number of my strings therefore increased as I went along,
although I was spending freely.  In this way I became continually richer.
     To conclude the financial question.  This system broke up suddenly and
completely on arrival at Yunnansen.  Here the French were trying to extend
their influence from Tonkin in pursuance of which object they had flooded
the city with agents who were trying to force the French dollar into
circulation.  Opposed to them were the two old systems; valuing sliver by
weight, and the tael; and the Mexican dollar, which had hitherto been the
universal currency of the coast.  (The Mexican dollar was itself guaranteed
by being stamped by the mark or initials of some responsible firm of
merchants.)  Peking had just begun to coin a dollar of its own with the
imperial dragon.  This is one of the most beautiful coins I have ever seen.
     The result of the contention of the currencies was that in Yunnansen
one could buy things at an absurdly low price, provided that one would pay
with the dollars which the merchant was being subsidized to accept.  "When
thieves fall out, honest men come by their own."  It is certainly amusing
to watch them cutting their own throats in order to cut ours more
efficiently later on.  I only wish we could stop the second part of the
process.
     We reached Yunchangfu on the fifth day from Tengyueh.  Our first march
took us up the valley of the Shweli, which we crossed on a floating bamboo
bridge.  The road from there to Pingho winds uphill for about five thousand
feet.  The road was nowhere really bad, but in some places so steep that
riding was difficult.  The third day took us to Lu Chiang Chiao, in the
valley of the

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Salween.  The gorge is indescribably sublime.  It is sentinelled by
magnificent hills of splendid and seductive shapes.  The air was mild yet
fresh.  No menace of chill, yet no taint of oppression.  The road was not
steep as on the other side of the watershed and the descent afforded a
series of superb views.
     The Salween has the reputation of being the most deadly river in the
world.  Its only rivals are in New Guinea and, at an earlier day, the
Amazon, the Niger and the Congo.  It is supposed to have a specially fatal
form of malaria which kills most people outright and from which on one ever
wholly recovers.  No doubt, some of the lower reaches are extremely
pestilential; but in this section one might establish an ideal sanatorium.
The course of the Salween had not at that time been completely explored.
There is not only fever but massacre in that romantic ravine.  Part of it
is inhabited by the Lolos (they are not vaudeville artists but tribes)
reported to be exceedingly primitive and addicted to head hunting, kidney
chasing, phallus fishing and testicle trapping, so that their cooks are
famous for stewed spleen, pancreas puddings and appendix on toast.
     I met a number of these tribesmen; they reminded me very much of some
of the wandering peoples of Central Asia and various folks of the low
country of Mexico; and I was reminded of them in turn by many of the nomads
of the Sahara.  They were very different from the Chinese ion costume,
manner and appearance.  In character, I found them charmingly childlike.
Of course, it was easy enough to imagine that a tactless traveller might
alarm them in all sorts of ways without intending to do so, and that they
would react as naturally and innocently as any other creatures of the wild
might do.  But they were entirely free from the malignant envy, the panic
born of prejudice and the perverse passions produced by hypocritically
pretending to suppress natural instincts, which one associates with
tradesmen in the West End of London and ministers of religion.
     Litton's idea of a holiday had been to explore the upper reaches of
this river.  He had in fact wanted to reach that very spot which I had
myself picked out for my objective, where the Salween, Mekong and Yangtze
Kiang run parallel to within a space of forty miles, while at their mouths
the distance between each is two thousand miles instead of twenty.  At each
village Litton was received with the utmost courtesy and goodwill; but when
he disclosed his intention of proceeding northwards, it created panic.
They told him that to the north were no men but devils only; accursed races
of the pit whose only methods of communicating ideas were envenomed arrows,
pitfalls and the poisonous fluff of the bamboo which acts more subtly than
ground glass.
     I thought this story extraordinarily typical of human thought in
general.  Everyone admits that we have reached the summit of wisdom, scaled
the

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loftiest pinnacles of morality, put the crown of perfection upon the
cranium of progress, and everyone knows perfectly well how this remarkable
result has been achieved.  But at the first hint that anyone proposes to
take a step farther on this road, he is universally set down as a lunatic
of the most dangerous type.  However, the most savage Lolos are content
with that diagnosis, whereas the most enlightened English add that the
pioneer is not only a lunatic but a pervert, degenerate, anarchist an the
rest of it --- whatever terms of abuse chance to be in fashion.  The
abolition of slavery, humane treatment of the insane, the restriction of
the death penalty to serious offences, and of indiscriminate flogging, the
admission of Jews, Catholics, Dissenters and women as citizens, the
introduction of the use of chloroform and antiseptics, the application of
stem to travel, and of mechanical principles to such arts as spinning and
printing, the systematic study of nature, the extension of the term poetry
to metres other than the heroic, the recognition of painting other than
voluptuous coloured photographs as art, and of music other than classical
melody as art --- these and a thousand similar innovations have all been
denounced as chimerical, blasphemous, obscene, seditious, anti-social and
what not.
     We crossed the Salween by means of a bridge ornamented with shrines
and a delightful and romantically beautiful house for the toll-keeper.
Caesar, when he crossed the Rubicon, had less aesthetic attractions and
less expense.  I did not envy him, and as for the bridge, it did not seem
aware of its responsibilities, which is perhaps the best state of mind in
which a bridge can be.
     The road was in unexpectedly good condition from the Salween to Pu
Pa'o, a long stage rendered unpleasant towards the end by threatening rain,
which carried out its fell designs in the course of the night.  For the
first time we experienced native curiosity in wholesale form.  We had been
recommended to avoid this by secretiveness.  This strange wild beast, a
white woman, was to be camouflaged in Chinese clothes and bundled out of
sight as soon as possible.
     I adopted exactly opposite tactics.  I said to the people, "Come and
see, enlarge your minds, increase your experience, take the fullest
advantage of this opportunity."  They were so accustomed to conventional
European cowardice that at first they were inclined to be unruly and even
suspicious.  Can it be a trap?  But a few minutes convinced them of my
absolute faith and friendliness, so that everyone became good-temnpered and
frank.  Their instinct and good manners, which nearly all men outside
civilization possess, soon told them what conduct was really annoying and
offensive; and they abstained immediately.
     Europeans too often make up their minds to resent certain actions
which are really quite harmless and natural.  They persuade themselves that
everything

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which their grandmothers would not do in Sunday School must be resented
with the utmost rigour.  This attitude is the root of at least ninetenths
of the trouble about "foreign devils".  The only unpleasantness between
local natives and alleged whites which came under my notice during this
journey was when some travelling missionary, instead of attending to his
own affairs, took it upon himself to insult (in wretchedly and comically
illiterate Chinese) some villagers who happened to be carrying an idol in
procession as part of the festivities of New Year's Day (January 25th).  He
might as well have spoiled a children's party on the ground that the fairy
stories which amused them were not strictly true.
     The action was morally indistinguishable from brawling in church.  I
may not believe in the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius, but I
see no reason for inflicting my incredulity on the people of Naples.  The
villagers naturally resented the ill manners of this brainless boor and
told him to shut up.  He immediately began to scream that he was being
martyred for Christ's sake.  I told him that if I could have brought myself
to touch him, I would have thrashed him within an inch of his life.  He did
not understand my attitude; but I don't suppose there is much in this funny
world that he did understand.
     On the twenty-third we came to Yuncangfu.  The road during this march
was in excellent repair.  It bordered on a lovely lake, which interested me
extremely as having no obvious outlet unless through a curious rocky cave;
but I could not be sure of this, no current of any sort being visible.
     On arrival in the town I was greeted by the Tao Tai, who sent a
deputation of brilliantly clad and highly dignified servants with presents.
These of course I returned with the exception of one or two trifles which I
retained in order to avoid discourtesy, and on my part bestowed goods of
European manufacture.
     The next act was an interview with the mandarin in his hall of state
where we sat side by side, low down, leaving the place of honour for the
Son of Heaven and his immediate satellites.  Having exchanged polite
generalities about philosophy and virtue (he seemed to think that I was no
mean authority on the latter subject) we dealt lightly with more mundane
topics and proceeded to extricate ourselves from each other's presence in
accordance with the most elaborate etiquette.  He concluded by inviting me
to share with him the offal which had been rejected by the dogs and kites
and I expressed my humble rapture at being permitted to partake of the
celestial banquet which his heavenly hospitality had prepared for the
meanest and mouldiest of mankind.
     The mandarin was one of the most beautiful men I have ever seen.  I
use the word beautiful in its strictly aesthetic sense.  He was, I judge,
between thirty-five and forty years old; his features were astonishingly
perfect and

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their expression full of noble intelligence and lofty benevolence,
harmonized by a placidity due to a consciousness of his superiority so
unbroken and unquestioned that it had been absorbed into subconsciousness.
He was a miracle of art and that art perfectly concealed.  His complexion
had more than the smoothness of the most exquisite southern European types;
yet all this impeccability of excellence was not marred, as is too often
the case with Greek sculpture, but lacking that touch of the bizarre which
Goethe postulates as essential to supreme beauty.  He possessed that peace
which I believe is intended to inform images of the Buddha, but which
nearly always appears as a mere lack of any positive passion.  The mandarin
of Yunchang radiated royalty.
     It was easy to read his history; that he had been exiled to so remote
and barbarous a city bore witness to the heinousness of the offence which
had incurred so severe a sentence.  On subsequent inquiry I was told that
he had been accused of "failing in respect towards the imperial swans".  My
informant did not say in what his error of ritual consisted.  (Another
rumour, so absurd as to be credible, is that he was not criminal at all but
insane; that he had the delusion that he was a Fellow ofSt. John's College,
whether Cambridge or Oxford, I did not learn; and from all accounts it
makes little difference.)  The superb epicureanism of his expression was
equally indicative of his spiritual superiority to even such blasting
disaster as the wrath of the emperor and his divine mother.
     The banquet was worthy of the man.  Beginning at high noon, it ended
only when Kephra the Beetle passed through the pylon of midnight; and
during thee twelve hours, there was no intermission in the arrival of new
dishes and entertainments.  The opulence of Trimalchio was concealed
beneath the refinement of Lucullus and the culture of Horace.
     Of late years Chinese cooking has become popular, though not nearly as
popular as it deserves to be, in New York, Paris and London.  In new York
it is the best food; in Amurrka, outside New York, it is the only food (bar
sea-food) fit for human consumption save in the Indian Grill Room in Los
Angeles, Chez Antoine in New Orleans, and one or two other remote oases in
the wilderness of canned abominations.  In London, the vulgarity of the
idea of a square meal has destroyed oriental delicacy; in Paris the
refinement of French epicureanism combines with the charm of China.
     But nowhere in Europe or America is the Chinese cook able to convey
the essence of his excellence.  One can no more understand a Chinese dish
in Europe than one can enjoy an Egyptian cigarette.  As to cross running
water destroys the enchantment of witches, or to traverse black seas
destroys the cast of the Brahmin, so the flavour of Chinese food is bounded
by the Great Wall.  I well understand why the exiled Mongol feels that the
cannot rest in peace in any other than the sacred soil.  The dishes too
which one obtains at

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Beem Nom Low's or at the Taverne Pascal are not those esoteric --- shall we
say Eleusinian? --- ectasies which intepret the soul of the Wonderland of
Flowers.
     I may mention a condiment composed exclusively of rose petals from
which, by a subtle process, all those elements which are capable of
nourishing the human body have been abstracted.  But for the most part I
dare not even describe some of the dainties which make Yunchang, to this
day, a fragrant memory in my mind.  To do so would be to draw a culinary
parallel with "Le Jardin des Supplices."  Not that the book is the real
China; it is rather a wish phantasm of China by the delirium of a
degenerate.
     Yunchang is noted for its temples.  In one of those is a superb
delineation of some of the Buddhist hells, where the penalties for various
vices are depicted with what is sometimes very startling realism.  I was
sorry not to have been able to stay longer in this perfumed paradise of
beauty and pleasure, where every element of art and nature were
harmoniously woven as if endeavouring to echo the melody of the personality
of the mandarin.
     The next day took us over superbly swelling hills upon whose bosom
slumbered a lake.  Here once more I was mystified as to its outlet.  At the
end of a delicious day we slept in a temple.  It was the first day of the
year and everyone but the missionary was rejoicing.  Crackers clustered on
long poles of bamboo and gay ornaments of coloured paper were the principal
offerings to the eye, while the ear was delighted with all kinds of
instrumental and vocal music.  Strange delicate cakes and comfits tempted
the tongue, while faint perfumes stirred the nostrils.  The breeze was
sweet with burning sandalwood and subtle with the sweat of dainty dancers.
Even the sense of touch vibrated with virile joy as one's nerves trembled
beneath the beatitude of innocent people swarming on every side.
     I have noted about this day's march, "Roads everywhere good."  "Good"
is a relative term.  The Chinese have a proverb that a road is good for ten
years and bad for ten thousand; most of the particular road I estimated at
not less than eight thousand.  I actually proposed to being home one bit of
it; if the weight had not been prohibitive, it would have been well
worthwhile.  This was a slab of granite about fifteen feet long, three
broad and three thick, and holes had been bored completely through it by
the hoofs of the pack animals, so that the mud was visible clean through
the stone.









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                              56


     The day after New Year we crossed the Mekong.  The river flows through
a superb gorge with extremely steep banks.  Inscriptions of all kinds were
carved on the naked cliffs.  I was aware of a very curious sensation in
crossing both this river and the Salween.  I can only describe it by saying
that I seemed to be aware of the genius loci.  At night, the wild beauty of
the scenery was further enhanced.  A house in the adjacent fields, several
acres in extent, caught fire.  This warm glow in the midst of the cold
vastness of the plateau and the stars was very weird; and the silhouettes
of the excited peasants who were trying to keep the fire from spreading
seemed to dance in front of the flickering flames gigantically.  It was a
sort of opium dream of hell.
     Talking of opium, I purchased the necessary apparatus and began to
learn to smoke.  I have already described the fiasco with laudanum in
Kandy, and somewhere in Burma I had made an equally futile experiment with
powered opium, taking thirty grains or so with no greater profit than
making myself suddenly and painlessly sick.  I found smoking the drug
equally unavailing.  I smoked twenty-five pipes in five hours with no
result whatever.  It now appears that I was not inhaling properly; but (for
all that) I might have got something out of twenty-five pipes!  The fact is
that I have an idiosyncrasy with regard to this drug.  I sometimes wonder
whether I did not use up all my capacities in that respect in a previous
incarnation; possibly I was Ko Hs'uen.
     East of the Mekong, the path becomes much less satisfactory, partly
owing to the geological differences.  The whole country between Sha Yang
and Chu Tung is across a steep wide range.  There are innumerable
barrancas, with which Mexico had made me familiar.  The atmosphere of China
had by this time begun to soak into my soul.  Chinese art explained itself
as inspired by Chinese nature.  There is a vast, free, pale, delicate
expanse of colour and form, whose lines are visibly determined by the very
structure of the globe itself.  There is an infinite harmony and ease in a
journey such as I was making.
     The physical geography is even more vast in its own way that that of
the Himalayas; and the country seems somehow less definite, less
specialized yet equally ineluctable!  Small vivid patches of colour are
associated rather with the works of man that those of nature, and if I were
to endeavour to give a name to the poetic quintessence of the province of
Yunnan I should content myself with one word --- space.  The Sahara Desert
itself and the sea do not exceed this district in this respect, for they
obtain their effects by what I may call the brutal method of sheer
magnitude.  Here the country is as diversified as Cumberland or
Switzerland; the effect of immensity, of almost formless immensity, is
obtained by slightly increasing the scale of quite normal types of hill,
forest, lake and river, so that man and his ant heaps appear absurdly
diminutive by means of delicate satire rather than drastic demonstration.
     The character of the journey constantly changes.  The steep and
desolate range scarred by barrancas gave place in a single march to the
loveliest wooded hills, yet the slight magnification of everything produced
a sense of tedium.  To enjoy China fully, one must allow one's soul to
expand to the scale of the scenery and this cannot be cone by ardour, as it
can among great glaciers.  It must be a gently beatific and philosophical
adaptation of oneself to one's environment.  During this month, my poetic
genius was lulling itself by means of an ineffably beautiful rhythm and
rime scheme.  On this whole journey I composed only tow poems, and for the
first time in my life I did not write them down, so to speak,
automatically; I made up the verses in my head and only took pen when they






were complete.  The second of the poems, "The King Ghost", is most peculiar
psychologically.  It is as if I had been stripped to the skin of my
infinite mentality.  It refers to the country south of Yunnanfu where the
North Wind, or rather North Draught, was the dominant demon of the desert.
     These sensuous yet savage uplands conveyed a peculiar spiritual
exaltation such as I have experienced nowhere else and I translated them
into "The Opium Smoker".  In all these months I succeeded in completing
only tow sections;the other six were invented and written down later.
     My diary from Mekong to Talifu is very meagre.  The most interesting
entry is this, Saw child saved from missionary (one eye lost) showing marks
of gouging."  I do not remember at this distance of time what the incident
was.  It was nothing unusual.  Medical missionaries in remote districts
tend to become sadistically insane from the boredom of their lives.  Being
brainless, they cannot endure it; and take advantage of their circumstances
to vivisect the poor far more freely than is done in London hospitals.
     Almost every day blesses the traveller with some delightful
geographical surprises.  I recall, for instance, plodding wearily up a pass
of decidedly rugged character.  It was natural to expect that the other
side of the pass would be not very dissimilar.  I reached the top --- and
was stupefied.  Instead of looking down into a valley, I saw the ground
stretching away from me perfectly level, a shallow oblong with a rim of
grassy mounds.  It was highly cultivated land, paddy fields and plantations
of white poppy ablaze in the sunlight with straight narrow channels of pure
pale green and pale blue water marking off one meadow from another.
Similar surprises constantly

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crop up.  Their unexpectedness suggests the atmosphere of "Alice in"
"Wonderland", while their formal beauty reminds one of the character visions
of the "alchemical plant".  A less accurate but perhaps more intelligible
analogy is that of the curiously luminous, exquisite and irrational
landscapes which were used as backgrounds by such painters as Mantegna,
Memling and Leonardo da Vinci.
     On February 1st we entered a magnificent gorge.  The culminating
ecstasy is the approach to Hsia-Kuan but means of a natural rock bridge
amid rock walls.  It is as if one had come suddenly upon the "dark tower"
of Childe Roland, a fortress built by titanic gnomes when the planet was a
semi-liquit flux of lava.
     The road to Talifu, the second greatest city of the province and the
most picturesquely situated and historically important, breaks off from the
main road across China and runs sharply northward for eight miles across
wild desolate moorlands.  Every weak spot in the defences of the wilderness
has been seized upon by the industry of the Chinese and turned into a
glowing patch of cultivated soil.  The approach to Tali itself inspires the
stranger with a certain awe, for life is seen wrestling with death in a
supreme spasm.  The pullulating towers and temples of the town seem
literally to quake amid the rotten and restless ruins with which they are
interspersed.  And thereby hangs a tale.
     During eighteen years the province of Yunnan had been the theatre of
civil war.  Tali was the greatest stronghold of the Mohammedans, their
opponents being (more or less) Mahayana Buddhists.  There was not really, I
fancy, much to choose between them.  The outward and visible sign of Islam
in these parts is that the door of a Moslem is protected from malignant
demons by a poster inscribed with sacred characters instead of a fierce-
looking genius.  Also he objects to pork.  The cause of the war was in fact
either that the Mohammedans raided the pork butchers or that thePork Trust
wished to extend its market by force.  I do not remember how many million
men were said to have been killed in the course of these struggles, but
something like two thirds of the whole area of Talifu (some estimates gave
three quarters) had been razed to the ground in the final storming of the
stronghold.
     Dr. Clark, the medical missionary of Talifu, received us with great
courtesy and hospitality.  I hound him a sincere and earnest man; more,
even an enlightened man, so far as it is possible for a missionary to be
so; but that is not very far.  I found him totally ignorant both of
canonical Buddhism and of local beliefs.  I tried to point out to him that
he could hardly hope to show the natives the errors of their way of
thinking, unless he knew hat that was.  But he declined to see the point.
He was so cocksure that his own sect of Christianity held truth in utter
purity and entirety that he could not imagine

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that the Chinese had any way of thinking at all.  He regarded their refusal
to follow him as a mixture of sheer dullness and sheer wickedness.
     I forget the figures with regard to the converts at Talifu.  In
Yunnanfu the staff of six missionaries claimed four converts in four years
and I imagine that these four were rice Christians at that.  The truth
seems to be that there are two main types of non-Christian religion.  The
first may be described as philosophical.  In this category I place the more
intelligent classes of Buddhist, Hindu and Mohammedan.  To convert these
people it would obviously be necessary to show them that Christianity
offers them a more satisfactory explanation of the universe than their own;
and not only have I never met a missionary who was capable of doing this,
but not even one who admitted the desirability of it or attempting it.
     The other type is the superstitious to which belong the fetish-
worshipping varieties of Buddhist and Hindu and pagan (Equatorial Africa
and Polynesia) with their paraphernalia of miracles, sacrifices,
priestcraft, penance, vicarious atonements and the like.  It is up to the
missionary to show that the Christian form of such things is superior to
the local variety and the difficulty is usually insuperable.  The native
can produce much bigger and more improbable miracles, a much more
terrifying demonology, a far more fascinating pantheon, with a more
alluring (and, so to say, actual) ritual than even the papist.  The native
perhaps seems little reason why he should not accept Christianity, but
certainly none at all why he should discard his own beliefs which seem to
him more vivid and more veracious, better adapted and better attested than
the new.  It is in fact only among the very lowest class of superstitious
savages that Christianity makes any headway.  Where Christian and Moslem
missions are in direct rivalry, Islam collects the higher and Christianity
the lower sections of the society.
     Disappointed about learning Chinese ideas at first hand in this remote
region, I hoped at least to get available information about the effects of
opium smoking.  Dr. Clark informed me that these effects were appalling ---
the usual scaremonger story.  He said it was the curse of the country and
that his clinic was full of victims; "Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds,"
he groaned, "physical and moral wrecks from the habit."  "I should like to
see one," I replied with the appropriate sigh and shudder.  "Well, you have
only to come down to my clinic any morning," re returned: "there are
hundreds and hundreds and hundreds."  He groaned again.  Well, I went down
to his clinic and he went on groaning that there were hundreds and hundreds
and hundreds, and I went on sighing that I should like to see one.
     During my whole journey, I never saw a man whom I could call
definitely the worse for opium.  My wife's chair coolies were cases in
point.  They had smoked from twelve years old or thereabouts; and when I
say smoked, I mean smoked.  Every night on reaching the inn, temple or
camp, as the case

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may be, they cooked their rice and started to smoke directly they had eaten
it, continuing till they went to sleep.  In the morning again they smoked
before starting.  The chair (with Rose and the baby, and the books which I
like to have handy to read at odd moments without unpacking my valise)
weighed over one hundred and sixty pounds.
     Each man had therefore to carry forty pounds.  Not much, but a load of
this kind is very different to dead weight.  Each man had to keep in step
with the rest and shake the chair as little as possible; and this over
rough hilly toads, often slippery with mud; perhaps against a head wind, in
which case the furniture of the chair offered a large surface.  One of
these coolies, the heaviest the most inveterate smoker of the quartet,
cannot have been less than sixty years old.  I timed the men under the
worst conditions; a road mostly uphill, driving sleet --- half a gale ---
dead ahead, streaming slippery cobbles, and they did eight miles without a
rest in two hours dead.  If those men were "physical wrecks from abuse of
opium", I should like to see the animal in his undamaged state!
     There are of course men who have injured their health by opium; and
one can see such on the coast, where the affair is complicated with alcohol
and European vices.  But on the whole, the search for an opium fiend in
China is on all fours with the search for the man with tobacco amblyopia in
England.  Consular reports and independent medical opinion are unanimous
that opium smoking does little or no harm to the Chinese.  Dr. Thomas
Stevenson, in his special article in Quain's "Dictionary of Medicine", sits
on the fence as follows: "Great differences of opinion exist as to the
pernicious or other effects of opium smoking.  Some would have us believe
that the practice is pernicious, not to say deadly; but debasing it often
is.  The pictures drawn as to its effects are evidently coloured by the
bias of the observer.  On the other hand some would persuade us that the
practice is harmless, not to say beneficial.  Doubtless neither view is
absolutely correct, and whilst opium smoking is pernicious, the evils have
been greatly exaggerated."  These remarks strike me on the whole as fair.
     I have myself made extensive and elaborate studies of the effects of
indulgence in stimulants and narcotics.  (See my "The Psychology of
Hashish", "Cocaine", "The Green Goddess", "The Diary of a Drug Fiend" etc.)
I have a vast quantity of unpublished data.  I am convinced that personal
idiosyncrasy counts for more in this matter than all the other factors put
together.  The philosophical phlegmatic temperament of the Chinese finds
opium sympathetic.  But the effect of opium on a vivacious, nervous, mean,
cowardly Frenchman, on an Englishman with his congenital guilty conscience
or on an American with his passion for pushing everything to extremes is
very different; the drug is almost certain to produce disaster.
     Similarly, hashish, which excites certain types of Arab, Indian, Malay
or

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Mexican to indiscriminate murder, whose motive is often religious insanity,
has no such effect on quietly disposed, refined and philosophical people,
especially if they happen to possess the faculty of self-analysis.  In
brief, generalization about such exceptionally subtle problems is a snare.
     One one point, however, I must admit to thinking and feeling somewhat
strongly.  Dr. Clark told me that the missionaries treated the opium habit
with injections of morphia; and in other parts of China I learnt that they
had taught the Chinese, with the same laudable intention, to sniff cocaine.
     The British government has acted with incredible folly.  The economic
prosperity of India is largely bound up with the export of opium.  Whilst I
was in China a petition against "the accursed traffic" had been presented.
It was signed by many of the most eminent and enlightened men in China, to
say nothing of the sister-in-law (I think it was) of the emperor whom they
had persuaded to declare herself a Christian so as to have a foot in the
enemy's camp.  The fact was the most of the petitioners were themselves
opium growers whose business was damaged by the competition of the Indian
product.  In the same way, of course, many of the missionaries were
employed by the manufacturers of morphia and cocaine to introduce these
drugs instead of the practically harmless and even beneficial YEN.
     China has been the most civilized country in the world; from the time
of Lao Tzu and Confucius, the fringe of its culture has been torn by the
claws of commerce, but it will survive the collapse of Europe.  And in
Yunnan the contamination of the foreign devil had not gone very far; in
fact, it had not yet reached the asymptote of its own curve.  However, the
clearing of the ground had long been complete.  There are practically no
wild animals in the province.  I did not even see one of those famous
pheasants which I was anxious to shoot.  I had hitherto bagged nothing but
occasional pigeons for the pot.
     At Talifu, nevertheless, there is great sport to be had.  From the
great deserts to the north, across the mighty mountains, migrate many
magnificent birds, especially cranes and geese.  I went out from the city
northwards, for these birds migrate at this time of the year from the
terrible highlands of Central Asia to the warm valleys and plains of the
low country.  I used to lie behind an embankment which was perhaps at one
time part of the fortifications of the city, and shoot them as they came
over.  It was very difficult sport.  The birds flew very high and at a
tremendous pace.  Some idea may be gained from the fact that a grouse shot
clean through the head would fall as much as a quarter of a mile from the
embankment.  The geese are admirable eating, but the flesh of the crane is
very coarse and fishy.
     Talking of shooting, I may as well sum up the subject by saying that
the part of China through which I travelled offers very poor sport on the
whole; there is usually the chance of a pigeon for the pot, but that is all
one can get

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without taking a great deal of pins.  I had heard so much of the gorgeous
beauty of the Chinese pheasant and looked forward to bagging a few, but
never so much as saw one during the whole march.  As for quadrupeds, I
never set eyes on as much as a rabbit or a marmot, let alone a deer.  Foxes
abound; but they did not come my way.  Chinese civilization is so
systematic that wild animals have been abolished on principle.  That at
least is the only explanation that suggests itself to me.
     We had been told that we should find ample supplies of fresh food of
all sorts everywhere.  Nothing could have been farther from the truth.  We
could get no fresh mild, the Chinese considering it obscene to extract it;
but strangely enough, in even the smallest villages, we were able to buy an
excellent brand of evaporated cream which some enterprising drummer had
managed to unload along the track.  There was no mutton to be had; and it
was only seldom that we managed to but a goat or kid.  Poultry and eggs
were fairly plentiful in most places; rice of an inferior quality and the
most suspicious-looking kind of pork were the staple food of the people.
Flour was rarely available and of course there was no butter.
     Salama was in great distress at the difference between the local rice
and the Indian variety to which he was accustomed, while as a Moslem he
abhorred pork.  I too would not eat it, valuing the respect in which he
held me, as a sahib who partook not of the abominations of my race.
Luckily, distrusting my informant, I had supplied myself with a
considerable stock of canned provisions before starting, and I increased
this at Tengyueh, buying some of Litton's stores from his widow.  Even so,
we were running very short before we reached Yunnanfu.
     At this hour, seventeen years later, I recall almost more vividly than
any other incident of the journey, an absurd little tragedy in this
connection.  We had some tins of coffee and milk, and we had come to the
last portion of the last tin.  We treasured it for days, looking forward to
enjoying it on some great occasion as never an epicure looked forward to a
bottle of rare wine.  The  moment came, we prepared the great drink with
almost reverential care.  And just as we were going to drink it, my wife
shifted her position and spilled it.  It would be hopeless to try to
express the bitterness of our disappointment.  Stay-at-home people can form
no idea of the strength of the obsession which trifles impose.  Conrad in
"An Outpost of Progress" tells of a murder and suicide beginning in a
quarrel between two close friends, traders up-river, over a few lumps of
sugar.
     During our short stay in Talifu, we saw the biggest pageant with which
the Chinese welcome spring.  I did not know enough Chinese to understand
the details of the ceremony; and the missionaries regarded the while
business as a blasphemous pagan orgy from which all righteous people should
avert their gaze.  I could see clearly, however, that the central figure
was an ox.  He was

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evidently the hero of the occasion because he was going to help them out
with their ploughing.  It was a gay, spontaneous, harmless piece of
merriment; to see idolatry in it is sheer morbid prejudice.
     We left Tali on February 6th and got back to the main road.  The
following day was without interest, but on the eighth, the latter part of
the march led through a delightful valley of the most surprising beauty.
It was an altogether new type of scenery.  China is full of these delicious
revelations.  It has always some new delicate splendour to show the
traveller.  The variety is infinite, not as Alpine peaks or Scottish locks
differ, merely in detail; in China, one is always discovering a totally
strange fairyland.  The spirit of a man is reborn with every such vision.
It is not even possible to compare and contrast these beauties; each is
entirely individual, lord of its own atmosphere; the points of similarity
with other places such as geological formations, the flora, the villages
and the people seem to possess infinitesimal importance.
     On the ninth there was a novelty of another kind.  The dignity of
Johnny White as interpreter entitled him to ride on horseback; but
naturally he had to be content with a somewhat sorry screw, wile my own
pony was a fairly decent animal.  He thought the time ripe to attempt to
force me to "lose face": that is, to become an object of ridicule to the
coolies.  If he had succeeded, I need hardly point out, there would have
been and end of all discipline and we should probably have been robbed and
murdered in short order.  His idea was to start out ahead of us on my pony.
I did not find out what had happened for some time.
     When I did, I set out on foot at top speed after him.  In two or three
hours I came up with the culprit.  As luck would have it, he was crossing a
steep hillside; below the path were gigantic thorn bushes.  I came up
quietly and unperceived, put my left hand under his right foot and with one
deft jerk flung him from the saddle into a thorn bush.  It was quite
impossible for him to extricate himself, the bush being very large and
elastic, the thorns long and persuasive.  So I waited, peacefully smoking,
until the coolies began to arrive, when I got up and gave him a whack with
my whalebone hip as each man passed.  When all had gone by, I mounted my
pony and followed.  Johnny White was rescued by a subsequent caravan and
turned up during the halt for tiffin.  It was not I who had "lost face"
with the coolies!  And I had no more trouble of any kind for the rest of
the journey to Yunnanfu.
     This march was very long and dull, its monotony relieved only by a
fine view of lakes and hills.  But the next six days were utterly
uninteresting.  Not until the sixteenth did the featureless plateau give
way to the grand wooded gorges which caress Tatz'assa Tang.  The village
has no good inn, so we went on to a lovely glade which afforded a
delightful and romantic place for a camp.  I fell ill, I don't know of
what, for the next three days.  Whatever scenery there may have been I was
too sick to observe.

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     We reached Yunnanfu on the twentieth.  Mr. Wilkinson, the consul
general, wrote that he was very sorry not to be able to offer hospitality,
but the Bengali blackguard of Tengyueh had pout in a complaint that I had
assaulted him, so that his relations with me must be strictly official
until the matter was settled.  We found accommodation in the "d‚pendance" of
the French Hospital; an admirable place run by a Dr. Barbezieux and a
Parisian head nurse, both of them really too much accomplished and
delightful to be wasted on such a cesspool as this city.  I called on
Wilkinson and told him my side of the story of Litton's death.  Steps were
taken to make it hot for the doctor; but as my assault was not denied, the
consul general had to regard it as a technical offence, which was duly
purged by the payment of a small fine.
     The approach to Yunnanfu is worthy of remark.  The city is situated in
the centre of a plain ringed round by hills.  The suggestion is almost of a
crater, like Mexico City.  There is no adequate drainage for the rainfall.
The town itself seems, from a distance, to be perched on a huge mound some
fifty to a hundred feet in height.  But on investigation one discovers that
this mound is composed of the refuse of the city; the accumulation of
centuries of indescribable dirt.  It inclined one to accept the theory that
bubonic plague first appeared here and spread hence throughout the world.
      On the twenty-third I paid the inevitable visit to the inevitable
missionary.  This specimen was more bigoted and less intelligent than any I
had previously met.  I had not thought this possible.  Six missionaries in
four years working in this populous city did one even claim more than four
converts.  They attributed their failure, of course, to the personal
activity of the devil.  It never occurred to them that there might be
something wrong with their methods.  Roughly speaking, any man with energy
and enthusiasm ought to be able to bring at least a dozen others round to
his opinion in the course of a year, no matter how absurd that opinion
might be.  We see every day in politics, in business, in social life, large
masses of people brought to embrace the most revolutionary ideas, sometimes
within a few days.  It is all a question of getting hold of them in the
right way and working on their weak points.
     I enjoyed my ten days in Yunnanfu immensely.  I picked up quite a lot
of old prints at prices so low that I could hardly believe my ears.  The
city had never been ransacked by bric-…-brac hounds.
     Having settled my little official affair with the consul general, we
were free to become excellent friends.  He was a distinguished and
delightful man, though I could well understand that Litton had been a thorn
in his side.  He wanted everything done elegantly and correctly, while
Litton cared nothing for routine.  He was always imposing his tameless
personal genius on the province, with the result that he was always
achieving unexpected successes when Wilkinson expected him to be filling up
forms and docketing reports.
     For various reasons, I decided to abandon my original design to
descend

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the Yangtze; for one thing, the delays at Bhamo and Tengyueh had robbed me
of time.  I was anxious to get to Europe in good time to prepare a new
expedition to Kangchenjunga for 1907.  I had the mountain, so to speak, in
my pocket.  A part of average strength could make as certain of strolling
to the top as if it were the Strand.  I decided, therefore, to turn south
and make for Tonkin.
     On March 2nd, after breakfast and tiffin with the consul general, who
was unfortunately short of stores and could only spare us a couple of tins
of butter, we started along the cobbled track, lively with cherry blossoms.
The walking soon became very difficult; the paths were rough, wet and
slippery.  On the fourth we came to a pass in the mountains guarded
southwards by fine cliffs.  At nightfall we reached a lake by whose side we
camped.  The weather for the first five days of this journey was bitterly
cold.  The wind, shifting from south-east to south-west, literally took the
skin off our faces, even mine, which I had thought inured to all the
possible devilishness of nature.
     Later, this wind dropped and was replaced by a much more deadly
device; a steady draught from the north was infernally icy as when it
started its career in the ghastly deserts of Siberia.  It had the same
quality as the north wind which we had on Chogo Ri; it took no notice
whatever of poshtin (coats lined with sheepskin), sweaters, flannel shirts
and vests.  One felt as if one were absolutely naked.  There was no shelter
from it.  One might crouch behind a wall or a house, but although that
prevented the wind from blowing on one, it did not hinder the draught from
drawing from one.  The effect was just as bad; it simply exhausted one
bodily and mentally; it sucked out all vitality and courage.
     On the sixth we came out suddenly on the edge of a plateau with a
descent of some three thousand feet in front of us, through a fine gorge.
But I was hardly in a mood to appreciate nature.  For three days we had
practically nothing to eat but soup and Worchester Sauce.  When we asked
for eggs, we created something not far shot of a scandal.  Even rice was
scanty.  The villages on this route are few, far apart and poverty-
stricken.
     Of one thing we had plenty --- tea.  I had heard marvellous stories of
the so-called "brick tea" that hails from these parts; and laid in a large
stock of various brands to take back to England.  The bricks are usually in
the shape of a flat cone, somewhat hollow beneath.  It reminds one of the
straw hats of Japanese coolies.  The diameter is from eight inches to one
foot and the thicknesses from two to four inches.  The flavour is
excellent, very subtle and aromatic; but it possesses a property not
usually associated with tea, the desirability of which depends on the
physiological condition of the drinker, for it acts as a powerful laxative
and a purgative when strongly infused and consumed in excess.  When I
reached home and could compare it with the finest caravan

{495}




















teas, its flavour seemed less admirable, yet it retained its distinction
and was always worth its place in the caddy as a curiosity.  For myself,
too, it was a potent spell to evoke most vivid memories of this weirdly
fascinating journey.
     To return to the march to Mengtsz.  There is little to see that is
impressive.  My one memory is of a big pagoda perched on the crest of a
mountain that looked as if it had been cleft in twain by a wizard.  I was
heartily glad on the tenth when Mengtsz came into sight; a French outpost
with all the civilization, culture and cooking that heart of man can wish.
The inspector of customs, Mr. Brewitt Taylor, very kindly asked us to stay
in his house, though at first sight he could hardly believe that I was an
Englishman.  The journey had reduced me to rags; I had no chance of washing
or trimming my beard; the skin of my face was torn by the wind.  I must
have looked simply frightful.  (I still do.)
     We only stayed three days in Mengtsz in spite of the attractions of
the little French colony.  Everyone invited us everywhere, including a
garden party where I played lawn tennis for the first time in ten years.  I
will play once more --- when I return.
     There is one ghastly tale to be told.  The French intended to run a
railway up to Yunnan to extend their sphere of influence.  They had
surveyed the route satisfactorily and proceeded to import eight thousand
coolies.  With unbelievable stupidity, they got them from Manchuria.
Naturally enough, the men could not stand the climate, especially as no
proper accommodations had been provided to house them.  In six months only
five hundred were left.
     On March 14th we left Mengtsz for Manhao on the Red River --- three
days' easy travelling.  The very first night, an unpleasant incident took
place.  Wilkinson had made me promise on no account to strike any of the
men but to rely on him to punish any misconduct when they returned to
Yunnanfu.  It seemed as if they knew of this compact and the Great God
Wilkinson seemed very far off to them.  I could feel instinctively that the
respect, akin to godly fear, which I had previously inspired was less
powerful as an inhibition.
     We slept on the fourteenth at a seerai, dirty and entirely
comfortless.  I paid the host more than liberally; but he was insolent and
I had no means of abating the nuisance.  This emboldened my own coolies to
be mutinous; and in the course of a squabble with my wife (I being ahead
out of sight) one of them struck the baby.  I ground my teeth; but resolved
to keep my temper and my promise to the consul.
     The fifteenth was a long march over muddy cobbles full of holes where
my horse constantly slipped an stumbled.  It blew great guns and poured
blue cats all day.  We reached a village with an alleged European hotel;
the "Sino-France",

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a wattled hotel, unspeakably foul; the worst place I had yet struck in all
Asia.
     Manhao is a fine village situated on the banks of the Red River --- a
torrent which competes with the Salween for pre-eminence in deadliness,
both from disease and demons.  The Chinese refuse to sleep even a single
night in the valley; but I saw no cachectics in the village any more than I
had seen victims of opium elsewhere.
     The Red River at this point runs through a deep and narrow gorge.  We
found it stiflingly hot, after our long exposure to the icy winds of the
plateau.  I had hired a dup-out to take us down the rapids to Hokow, and
her I saw my chance of getting even with the coolies.  Having got
everything aboard, I proceeded to pay the head man the exact sum due to him
--- less certain fines.  Then the band played.  They started to threaten
the crew and prevented them from casting off the ropes.  They incited the
bystanders to take their part; and presently we had thirty or forty yelling
maniacs preparing to stone us.  I got out my .400 Cordite Express and told
Salama to wade ashore and untie the ropes.  But like all Kashmiris,
thoughtlessly brave in the face of elemental dangers, he was an absolute
coward when opposed to men.  I told him that unless be obeyed at once I
would begin by shooting him.  He saw I meant it and did his duty; while I
covered the crowd with my rifle.  Not a stone was thrown; three minutes
later the fierce current had swept us away from the rioters.
     The real danger now began.  This was the only part of the journey
where we encountered any serious risk of disaster.  The Red River, though
broad and deep, has all the characteristics of the wildest mountain
torrents.  It falls in a succession of dangerous rapids, all the more
perilous for the sudden sharp curves of the channel.  At almost every
corner we saw one or more wrecks, a far from reassuring spectacle.  I was
given to understand, however, that disaster rarely overtook boats going
down stream.  It is when they are being towed by insufficient power up the
rapids that they get out of control and are dashed upon the rocks.  For all
that, we managed to hit two nasty snags in the course of the day; one of
them ripped a hole in us amidships; but the men managed to stop the leak
with tarpaulin nailed in place by short boards with extraordinary speed and
efficiency.  They were evidently well accustomed to similar jobs.
     We reached Hokow on the eighteenth and struck a forlorn Englishman who
gave us tiffin and dined with us.  We all got gloriously drunk celebrating
the success of a journey which in the opinion of all reasonable people was
a crazy escapade, doomed from the first to disaster.  Another bubble had
burst!  The awe-inspiring adventure had proved as safe as a bus ride from
the Bank to Battersea.



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                              57


     I have had little occasion to mention my wife and child.  It is a case
of "happy the nation that has no history".  Rose had proved an ideally
perfect companion.  Since the nurse's elopement she had had no one to help
her with the baby.  There was also a good deal for her to do in camp.  We
often travelled over twelve hours a day in really trying conditions; we
encountered more than a little hardship, what with fatigue, cold, lack of
food and general discomfort; she never gave in, she never complained, she
never failed to do more than her her share of the work and she never made a
mistake.  She was in a class by herself as a comrade.  Even Eckenstein was
not so competent all round or so uniformly exultant.
     We had been over four months away from civilization; and she had not
only stood it but flourished exceedingly.  When we started, she had been
rather empty-headed and frivolous; while physically, though healthy, she
could not be called an athlete.  At the end she had acquired the kind of
soul that is evoked by intimate contact with naked nature.  Her figure was
straight and supple, scorning corsets.  Her limbs were lithe; her eyes
bright and eager; her face aflame with the joy of perfect physical well-
being and her heart exulting with the expectation of producing a new token
of our tenderness before the end of the year.
     In these four months I had been mildly indisposed with indigestion for
two days.  Rose had had one slight touch of fever, and a baby a cold in the
head which laster three days, and some minor digestive trouble during our
stay in Yunnanfu.  Not many families living in the most hygienic conditions
in England could show a cleaner bill of health.  We had good reason for
rejoicing and may be excused fro feeling decidedly proud.
     The next day we went on the Lao Kay, where there is a good hotel, and
more mosquitoes than I had seen for many a month.  We hurried on by train
to Yen Bay, a filthy hole with no redeeming feature.  The whole country and
its people are monotonously reddish brown; skin, clothes, food, roofs ---
everything but the grass and the trees, which are all the same shade of
dull green.  The whole forms a curiously harmonious picture, very low in
tone and undeniably depressing.  The sky itself was uniformly leaden,
though I suppose this was a question of the time of the year.  There are
few features in the scenery; a damp warmth broods upon the general
dullness.
     On the twentieth we reached Hanoi, the capital, but only stayed for
lunch.  There is nothing particularly interesting about the town to people
who have

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been uninterruptedly intoxicated for months upon the beauty and grandeur of
one of the wildest and noblest countries of the earth.  We took the after
noon train to Haiphong, the seaport of Tonkin, and put up at the Hotel du
Commerce.  Haipong is much like any other Eastern port.  There is the usual
colonial atmosphere and the variety of races like so much jetsam flung upon
the shores of the island of officialdom.
     One deliciously colonial incident must be related.  It gives the very
atmosphere of Claude FarrŠre's "Les Civilis‚s".  A large corner building on
the main street had been condemned and had to be blown up.  The boss of the
gang in charge went for instructions to the city engineer.  He ran him to
earth after prolonged search in a combination of drinking-hole and house of
ill-fame.  He was up to his neck in absinthe, which is not really a
wholesome drink in that climate; but he was able to talk and readily agreed
to calculate the charge of dynamite required for the house breaking.  He
took a stub of pencil and worked it out on the marble slab of his table.
Strange as it may seem, he shifted a decimal point two place to the right
without adequate excuse --- unless we accept the absinthe as an apology.
The boss went off with his figures and put in a charge just a hundred times
too big.  The whole block was completely wrecked; and they were still
clearing the street when we arrived.
     We were lucky to find a ship on the twenty-second for Hong Kong, after
which she was named.  The boat was a dirty tramp tub; her skipper a drunken
Italian who lived in flannel pyjamas which could not have seen a laundry
for months and spent all his time in the smoke room, gambling and boozing.
He came athwart my hawser once, refusing to listen to the complaint of
Salama about the way he was treated in the fo'c'sle.  I told him that I
would throw him off his own ship unless he did what I said p. d. q.  He
cringed and complied.
     How this ship ever made a voyage is a mystery.  The chief engineer, a
worn-out melancholy Scot, was as puzzled as I.  He said his engines were
"as rotten as the captain's guts".  They moved like a one-legged man with
St. Vitus' Dance and they sounded like tea trays being beaten, chains being
rattled and fire irons being thrown about, all at once.
     We could not even get clear of our moorings without tearing away the
port companion.  Twenty-four hours later we stopped.  The captain freely
admitted that he had lost his reckoning, didn't know where he was, didn't
know how to find out and didn't see why he should worry about it.  He went
back to his cards, leaving a junior officer to get entangled with the
sextant and chronometer.  Whether he obtained any results will never be
known, for during the day we drifted in sight of Hoiho.  By some weird
coincidence, this was our first port of call.  There being no harbour, we
stood half a mile out to sea, rolling and bucking sickeningly while boats
came from shore

{499}





















bringing our cargo; pigs in wicker crates which were stacked all over the
ship three deep; and large baskets of poultry.  It became quite impossible
to move about the main deck at all, and even on the upper deck there was
considerable crowding.  The stench created by these animals, a number of
which died on the voyage, was the limit.
     In the afternoon there appeared a magnificent Fata Morgana stretching
from west to south.  There was a perfectly clear double image in the sky at
an elevation of from ten to twenty degrees.  The  lower image of the
shipping was upright and then close above it was the image reversed.
     The rough sea and the utter incompetence of everybody concerned
combined to keep up over four days hanging about off the islands.  We got
away on the twenty-seventh and made our way through a choppy sea, in
horribly cold damp weather, to Hong Kong.
     We were now in the midst of comfort and could lay our plans for the
future.  We decided the Rose should return to England by way of India, so
as to pick up the baggage we had left at Calcutta; while I was to go via
New York in the hope of interesting people there in the proposed expedition
to Kangchenjunga.  I accordingly left for Shanghai by my old friend the
"Nippon Mary" on April 3rd.  The further interest of my journey is concerned
principally with my Magical career which is described in another chapter.
There are, however, one or two tales to be told.
     Our most distinguished passenger was a venerable missionary returning
to America after many years labouring in the Lord's vineyard.  He had just
become celebrated, a riot having taken place in which his mission was
destroyed.  His wife and children, his native teachers and his converts
were mostly murdered.  He himself had, however, been preserved fro the
Lord's service by the direct interposition of the Almighty, who had warned
him at the first rumour of trouble to leave his family and block to their
fate and flee to a convenient cavern where he could hide with only his head
above water --- he could duck it when strangers looked in --- till order
was restored.  He was absolutely cock-a-whoop over this.  It never occurred
to him for a moment that his conduct was open to criticism, though for my
part I could hardly believe my ears; that any man should tell such a story
of himself and boast of it was beyond my experience.
     In Shanghai I brought off a very remarkable test of the value of the
Tarot in divination.  The German postmaster, calling on my hostess, was
very much upset by the loss of a packet containing eighty thousand roubles
in notes sent by a bank in Peking to its head office in Shanghai.  I
offered to investigate the matter by the Tarot.  I described accurately the
two principal clerks who alone had access to the safe in which the
postmaster had himself put the parcel immediately on its arrival and whence
it had disappeared less than an hour later.  That Tarot told me that the
senior clerk was a steady-going

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conscientious man, saving a fixed sum out of his salary, devoted to his
work, free from vices and in no financial embarrassment.  His junior was a
careless youth, mixed up with women and known to be gambling heavily on the
races.  The postmaster confirmed this estimate of their characters.
     I inquired further and found that the junior clerk was responsible for
the disappearance of the packet; which seemed reasonable enough.  But then
the cards apparently went crazy.  They said that this clerk should not
suffer for his act.  The postmaster admitted that it might indeed be
difficult to bring the theft home to him; but so much the worse, since he
himself would be held responsible for the loss.  I inquired further and was
met with another facer which completed the circle of impossibilities.  They
said that the postmaster would not suffer in reputation.  The situation
became inexplicable.  I was frankly annoyed that, after so accurate a
beginning, the divination should have turned out so as to insult our
reason.  I could only apologize, shrug my shoulders and say, "Well, they
insist that it is all right for you."
     A few days later, the mystery was cleared up.  The return mail left
for Peking one half-hour after its arrival, and the junior clerk, in his
haste, had accidentally slipped the parcel into the mail bag, so that it
went safely to the bank in Peking.  The Tarot had vindicated itself in the
most striking way.  The junior clerk was responsible for the disappearance,
yet he did not suffer in consequence, nor did the postmaster.
     I was in some doubt as the whether to go to America via Honolulu or by
the northern Pacific route to Vancouver.  I longed to see Oahu again, and
yet I felt it a sort of duty to cover fresh ground.  While I hesitated,
fate decided.  The last berth for San Francisco via the Sandwich Islands
was sold over my head.  Alas! --- had I only known!  A quarter of an hour's
delay caused me to miss what might have been the most dramatic moment of my
life.  The ship I should have sailed by left Honolulu in due course and
fetched up four days later outside the golden Gate --- to find San
Francisco a raging flower of flame.
     I sailed on April 21st by "The Empress of India", took a flying glance
at Japan and put out into the Pacific.

          A savage sea without a sail,
               Grey gulphs and green aglittering.

We never sighted the slightest suggestion of life all the way to Vancouver,
twelve days of chilly boredom, though there was a certain impressiveness in
the very dreariness and desolation.  There was a hint of the curious horror
that emptiness always evokes, whether it is a space of starless night or a
bleak and barren waste of land.  The one exception is the Sahara Desert
where, for some reason that I cannot name, the suggestion is not in the
least of vacancy and barrenness, but rather of some subtle and secret
spring of life.

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     Vancouver presents no interest to the casual visitor.  It is severely
Scotch.  Its beauties lie in its surroundings.
     I was very disappointed with the Rockies, of which I had heard such
eloquent encomiums.  They are singularly shapeless; and their proportions
are unpleasing.  There is too much colourless and brutal base; too little
snowy shapely summit.  As for the ghastly monotony of the wilderness beyond
them, through Calgary and Winnipeg right on to Toronto --- words
fortunately fail.  The manners of the people are crude and offensive.  They
seem to resent the existence of civilized men; and show it by gratuitous
insolence, which they mistake for a mark of manly independence.  The whole
country and its people are somehow cold and ill-favoured.  The character of
the mountains struck me as significant.  Contrast them with the Alps where
every peak is ringed by smug hamlets, hearty and hospitable, and every
available approach is  either a flowery meadow, a pasture pregnant with
peaceful flocks and herds, or a centre of cultivation.  In the Rockies,
barren and treeless plains are suddenly blocked by ugly walls of rock.
Nothing less inviting can be imagined.  Contrast them again with the
Himalayas.  There we find no green Alps, no clustering cottages; but their
stupendous sublimity takes the mind away from any expectation or desire of
thoughts connected with humanity.  The Rockies have no majesty; they do not
elevate the mind to contemplation of Almighty God any more than they warm
the heart by seeming sentinels to watch over the habitations of one's
fellow men.
     Toronto as a city carries out the idea of Canada as a country.  It is
a calculated crime both against the aspirations o the soul and the
affections of the heart.  I had been fed vilely on the train.  I thought I
would treat myself to a really first-class dinner.  But all I could get was
high-tea --- they had never heard the name of wine!  Of all the loveless,
lifeless lands that writhe beneath the wrath of God, commend me to Canada!
(I understand that the eastern cities, having known French culture, are
comparatively habitable.  Not having been there I cannot say.)
     I hustled on to Baffalo to see Niagara.  Here I first struck the
American newspaper reporter in full bloom, in his native haunts.  Before I
had been half an hour in my Hotel I was tackled by a half a dozen
enthusiastic scribes.  I naturally supposed that they had somehow heard of
my Himalayan or Chinese adventures, and talked accordingly.  It gradually
dawned on me that somehow I was failing to fill the bill; and I presently
discovered that they had mistaken me for some English lieutenant who was
supposed to have crossed form Canada and from whom they wanted information
about some local foolishness.
     I took a pretty good look at Niagara.  It is absurd to shriek at the
desecration cause by building a few houses in the vicinity.  It seemed to
me that they helped rather than hindered one's appreciation.  They supplied
a standard of

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comparison.  All that has been said of the falls is, as the sayers admit,
ridiculously below the reality.  In their way they challenge comparison
with the mountains of Asia themselves.  They have the same air of being out
of all proportion with the observer.  They belong to a different scale; and
they impress one with the same idea of utter indifference by nature.  They
fascinate, as all things vast beyond computation invariably do.  I felt
that if I lived with them for even a short time they would completely
obsess me and possibly lure me to end my life with their eternity.  I felt
the same about the mountains of India, the expanse of China, the solitude
of the Sahara.  I feel as if the better part of me belonged to them, as if
my dearest destiny would be to live and die with them.
     I went on to New York on May 15th and spent a rather hectic ten days
sampling the restaurants and theatres.  But as for interesting people in
the Himalayas, I might as well have joined the china Inland Mission.
Nobody in New York had even heard of them, unless as meaningless items in
his hated geography lessons.  No one could see any sport in mountaineering
at all, or any scientific object to be obtained by reaching great heights.
After the first days I could not even find a listener.  The town had gone
completely mad; first over Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" which had made
canned food a drug on the market, though there was practically nothing else
to eat; and secondly by the shooting of Stanford White, which let loose all
the suppressed sexual hysteria of the whole population.
     They would talk of nothing else.  Everyone screamed in public and in
private about satyrs and angel children, and vampires, and the unwritten
law, and men higher up, and stamping out impurity.  For the first time in
my life I came into contact with mob madness.  Modern morality and manners
suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature
and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales.  They consequently seize upon
every incident of this kind to let off steam.  Knowing nothing and fearing
everything, they rant and rave and riot like so many maniacs.  The subject
does not matter.  Any idea which gives them an excuse of getting excited
will serve. They look for a victim to chivy, and howl him down, and finally
lynch him in a sheer storm of sexual frenzy which they honestly imagine to
be moral indignation, patriotic passion or some equally avowable emotion.
It may be an innocent Negro, a Jew like Leo Frank, a harmless half-witted
German; a Christ-like idealist of the type of Debs, an enthusiastic
reformer like Emma Goldman or even a doctor whose views displease the
Medial Trust.
     I sailed for England in the "Campania" on May 26th, arriving in
Liverpool on June 2nd after a pleasant voyage, during the latter part of
which I wrote most of "Rosa Coeli", to find letters awaiting me to tell me of
the tragedy of which I have given an account elsewhere.

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     From the moment of landing I struck a sequence of physical shocks.  As
I struggled to my feet after the blasting bolt of my bereavement, I found
myself with an infected gland in the groin which required excision.  The
first day I left the nursing home I got a chill in the right eye which
obstructed a nasal duct and required a whole series of extremely painful
operations which proved unsuccessful.  In the course of these, I got
neuralgia; this continued day and night for months, so violently that I
felt myself going mad.  After a bare months comparative health I acquired
an ulcerated throat which knocked me out completely until the end of the
year.
     On the top of all this came the discovery that my wife was an
hereditary dipsomaniac.  When our baby was born it lay almost lifeless for
more than three days and tat three weeks old nearly died of bronchitis.  I
had the sense to send for oxygen before the doctor arrived and this
precaution probably saved the child's life.  I fought like a fiend against
death.  The doctor gave the strictest orders that not more than one person
should be in the sick room at one time.  My mother-in-law refused to obey.
I thought I had suffered enough.  It was her hypocrisy that had sought to
justify her tippling by giving her children a share of the champagne and
thus implanted in Rose the infernal impulse which had wrecked her life and
love, and mine.  I made no bones about it; I took the hag by the shoulders
and ran her out of the flat, assisting her down the stairs with my boot
lest she should misinterpret my meaning.
     So Lola Zaza lives today.  May her life prove worth the pains I to to
preserve it.
     During my illness at Bournemouth, I wrote down from memory the bulk of
"Liber 777", the table of correspondences showing equivalents of the
religious ideas and symbols of various peoples.  Of course this rough draft
needed considerable revision and additions.  It was in fact two years in
the press.  But it stands today as the standard book of reference on the
subject.  I must admit to be thoroughly dissatisfied with it.  It is my
eager wish to issue a revised edition with an adequate comment and a key to
its practical use.  I refuse to feel any satisfaction at knowing that,
published at ten shillings, it is now quoted at three pounds fifteen
shillings as a minimum.  (Then why mention it!  Oh, shut up.)
     In October of this year I began "Clouds without Water," fully described
elsewhere.  But apart from these two books and a very few old lyrics, the
year was barren in respect of literature.  I was too intensely concentrated
on the performance of the Operation of the Sacred Magick of Abra-Melin the
Mage; perhaps too deeply shaken by my experience of the Abyss; and
certainly too much occupied with the actualities of life to have the
leisure or even to feel the impulse to distil from life that quintessence,
limpid truth, opalescent with lyrical light, which constitutes poetry.  Not
until sickness and sorrow had sobered my spirit did I once again find
myself free to extract

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the elixir of ecstasy from experience and fulfil my faculties by expressing
myself in rhythm.
     I close this chapter with a sigh.  For ten years my life had been a
delirious dance to a maddening music with incarnate passion for my partner,
and the boundless plain of the possible vibrating with the fervour of my
feet.  I had come through a thousand crises to the climax of my career.  I
had attained all my ambitions, proved myself at every point, dared every
danger, enjoyed every ecstasy that earth has to offer; the rest of my life
recedes from romance in that boyish idea of what romance should be.  From
this time, though much lay in store for me to accomplish, summit soaring
beyond summit of spiritual success, giant ranged behind giant for me to
challenge, I now learnt to look upon life with enlightened eyes.  I had
sought and I had found.  I must now seek them who seek  that they might
also find.  I must aspire, act and achieve, not only for myself to perfect
my personality, but for my fellow men in whom alone I could possibly fulfil
myself since I knew myself at last, not to be Aleister Crowley, an
individual independent of the communion of cosmic consciousness, but merely
one manifestation of the Universal Mind whose thought must be sterile
unless sown broadcast to blossom and bear fruit in every acre of God's
vineyard.















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