Confessions of Aleister Crowley

274 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 {450} 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