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At Cambridge one of my most intimate friends was a man named Parez of Emmanuel, and in him I 
recognized a supreme trencherman. One Saturday I had been held up at Hitchin, my racing roadster 
having sprung a leak. I got back to Cambridge too late to order brunch from the kitchens, so on 
Sunday morning there was nothing for it but to go round to Parez and see if he could feed me. To 
my joy, I found him reading and smoking by the side of a table spread with a brunch for six, 
conceived in a spirit of gargantuan hospitality. I invited myself, of course; but to my surprise Parez 
declined, saying that there was hardly enough for the party as it was. "Hang it," said I, "for God's 
sake let me stay; perhaps one of them won't turn up." My host agreed, remarking that the born-out-
of-wedlock offenders against the Criminal Law Amendment Act were late. After a couple of games 
of chess, something reminded him that he had forgotten to send out any invitations! We finished 
that brunch and I swear to God I didn't eat more than one and a half or one and three quarters 
myself. 
Later I asked him to dinner in London. He began with two large fried soles to his own cheek, and 
went on with a porterhouse steak. I forget the rest. But, compared with Wessely, he was a Succi! 
When Wessely reached Rodokass on the return journey, the servants asked permission to celebrate 
by killing two sheep of the flock which we had taken there; they would, or course, cook the best 
parts of the meat for the sahibs. Pfannl could eat nothing, and Guillarmod very little, but in a short 
time the servants repeated their request. Wessely had devoured practically the whole two sheep. 
Of course the mountain variety is not a Southdown. It probably does not weigh more than the 
average four months lamb in Sussex. But even so Wessely's exploit is pretty good. 
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On my own arrival at Rodkass, I mad rather a beast of myself. I had been starving on canned food 
for nearly two months, and that half-warm, half-cooked fresh mutton made me practically insane. I 
was suffering the agonies of sugar starvation plus the effects of a recurrence of malaria, so that 
vomiting and diarrhoea were continuous. But never in my whole life have I tasted anything like that 
mutton. I gorged myself to the gullet, was violently sick and ordered a fresh dinner. 
I am more an antique Roman than a Dane, 
....There's yet some mutton left. 
I may mention in this place that experience has convinced me of the truth of the Hindu theories 
about Prana. Apart from the chemical and physiological transactions involved in eating, one is 
nourished directly, but what one must call, however one may hate to do so, the vital principle in 
food. We had already found on Iztaccihuatl that canned food ten years old failed to nourish 
anything like as well as stuff recently tinned. We derived much more energy from fresh-killed 
mutton, cooked before rigor mortis had set in, than from ordinary butcher's meat. I ultimately 
learnt that I could make myself actually drunk on half a dozen oysters chewed in the manner of the 
yogis. 
One of the practices of Hatha Yoga consists in learning to reverse the peristaltic action of the 
alimentary canal at will, so that one can make oneself sick quietly without spasmodic action. What 
they do is to swallow a number of yards of tarband and eject it again by training the necessary 
muscles. They then apply these principles to their rice and, after allowing it to remain in the 
stomach for a short time, quietly reject it. This rice, though unchanged in appearance, contains no 
nourishment, so that a dog who ate it would starve. The object of the yogi is to relieve his body of 
the responsibility of dealing with the elements of the food which do not contribute to sustenance. 
One is forced to suspect the existence of some subtle principle attached to organic substances 
which gradually disappears after death, rapidly at first, and then with increasing slowness, so that 
the process is not complete perhaps for years. It is like the elimination of impurities from alcohol, 
the first distillation gets rid of most of them, but there is a residuum carried over which requires 
repeated fractionation1. 
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