Confessions of Aleister Crowley

303 jerk flung him from the saddle into a thorn bush. It was quite impossible for him to extricate himself, the bush being very large and elastic, the thorns long and persuasive. So I waited, peacefully smoking, until the coolies began to arrive, when I got up and gave him a whack with my whalebone hip as each man passed. When all had gone by, I mounted my pony and followed. Johnny White was rescued by a subsequent caravan and turned up during the halt for tiffin. It was not I who had "lost face" with the coolies! And I had no more trouble of any kind for the rest of the journey to Yunnanfu. This march was very long and dull, its monotony relieved only by a fine view of lakes and hills. But the next six days were utterly uninteresting. Not until the sixteenth did the featureless plateau give way to the grand wooded gorges which caress Tatz'assa Tang. The village has no good inn, so we went on to a lovely glade which afforded a delightful and romantic place for a camp. I fell ill, I don't know of what, for the next three days. Whatever scenery there may have been I was too sick to observe. {493} We reached Yunnanfu on the twentieth. Mr. Wilkinson, the consul general, wrote that he was very sorry not to be able to offer hospitality, but the Bengali blackguard of Tengyueh had pout in a complaint that I had assaulted him, so that his relations with me must be strictly official until the matter was settled. We found accommodation in the dépendance of the French Hospital; an admirable place run by a Dr. Barbezieux and a Parisian head nurse, both of them really too much accomplished and delightful to be wasted on such a cesspool as this city. I called on Wilkinson and told him my side of the story of Litton's death. Steps were taken to make it hot for the doctor; but as my assault was not denied, the consul general had to regard it as a technical offence, which was duly purged by the payment of a small fine. The approach to Yunnanfu is worthy of remark. The city is situated in the centre of a plain ringed round by hills. The suggestion is almost of a crater, like Mexico City. There is no adequate drainage for the rainfall. The town itself seems, from a distance, to be perched on a huge mound some fifty to a hundred feet in height. But on investigation one discovers that this mound is composed of the refuse of the city; the accumulation of centuries of indescribable dirt. It inclined one to accept the theory that bubonic plague first appeared here and spread hence throughout the world. On the twenty-third I paid the inevitable visit to the inevitable missionary. This specimen was more bigoted and less intelligent than any I had previously met. I had not thought this possible. Six missionaries in four years working in this populous city did one even claim more than four converts. They attributed their failure, of course, to the personal activity of the devil. It never occurred to them that there might be something wrong with their methods. Roughly speaking, any man with energy and enthusiasm ought to be able to bring at least a dozen others round to his opinion in the course of a year, no matter how absurd that opinion might be. We see every day in politics, in business, in social life, large masses of people brought to embrace the most revolutionary ideas, sometimes within a few days. It is all a question of getting hold of them in the right way and working on their weak points. I enjoyed my ten days in Yunnanfu immensely. I picked up quite a lot of old prints at prices so low that I could hardly believe my ears. The city had never been ransacked by bric-…-brac hounds. Having settled my little official affair with the consul general, we were free to become excellent friends. He was a distinguished and delightful man, though I could well understand that Litton had been a thorn in his side. He wanted everything done elegantly and correctly, while Litton cared nothing for routine. He was always imposing his tameless personal genius on the province, with the result that he was always achieving unexpected successes when Wilkinson expected him to be filling up forms and docketing reports. For various reasons, I decided to abandon my original design to descend {494}