Confessions of Aleister Crowley

290 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 {474} 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