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and also her poor lost erring son who might yet repent and be redeemed by the Precious Blood. 
I conclude my allusion to 66: 
Ho! I adopt the number. Look 
At the quaint wrapper of this book! 
I will deserve it if I can: 
It is the number of a Man. 
I had thus dismissed my mystical fancies about the number; I accepted it for purely moral reasons 
and on purely rationalistic grounds. I wanted to be a man in the sense in which the word is used by 
Swinburne in his Hymn of Man. 
Having to choose a Persian name, I made it Chioa Khan (pronounced Hiwa Khan) being the Hebrew 
for The Beast. (Khan is one of the numerous honorifics common in Asia.) I had no conscious magical 
intention in doing so. (Let me here mention that I usually called my wife Ouarda, one of the many 
Arabic words from Rose.) 
As to my study of Islam, I got a sheikh to teach me Arabic and the practices of ablution, prayer and 
so on, so that at some future time I might pass for a Moslem among themselves. I had it in my mind 
to repeat Burton's journey to Mecca sooner or later. I learnt a number of chapters of the Koran by 
heart. I never went to Mecca, it seemed rather vieux jeu, but my ability to fraternize fully with 
Mohammedans has proved of infinite use in many ways. 
My sheikh was profoundly versed in the mysticism and magic of Islam, and discovering that I was an 
initiate, had no hesitation in providing me with books and manuscripts on the Arabic Cabbala. These 
formed the basis of my comparative studies. I was able to fit them in with similar doctrines and 
other religions; the correlation is given in my 777. 
From this man I learnt also many of the secrets of the Sidi Aissawa; how to run a stiletto through 
one's cheek without drawing blood, lick redhot swords, eat live scorpions, etc. (Some of these feats 
are common conjurers' tricks, some depend on scientific curiosities, but some are genuine Magick; 
that is, the scientific explanation is not generally known. More of this later.) 
I was quite fixed in scepticism, as I have always been, but also in so-called rationalism, and I 
prosecuted these studies in a strictly scholarly spirit. I worked very hard at them and made great 
progress accordingly; but my true life was still the honeymoon, slightly diluted by the ordinary 
pleasures of sport and society. I relapsed into golf after some fourteen years' total abstinence; took 
a few lessons from the pro at the Turf Club, and found that my St. Andrews swing and the canniness 
inculcated by Andrew Kirkaldy 
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made a fine basis for playing a fairly decent game. We went to Helwan on February 19th; and I 
played nearly every day, filled with a passionate ambition to become amateur champion. I had 
picked up my old form so rapidly that I imagined myself a heaven-born golfer. But the game haled 
its own. I never even got to scratch. 
I did a certain amount of pigeon shooting at odd times. I had practised a good deal with clay pigeons 
at Boleskine and become a really first-class shot. I was also quite good at wild pigeons; but for some 
reason, trapped pigeons were quite beyond me. I dare not boast that I am even second rate. 
One day I joined a party of three to shoot quail, which I recall on account of a singular accident. I 
was in the middle of the line. A bird got up and flew between me and the man on my right; but I 
withheld my fire for hear of hitting him. We swung round again; another bird came in the same