Confessions of Aleister Crowley

281 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. {460} 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. {461} 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