339
Unfortunately, we arrived in Tangiers at a moment of political crisis. The sultan had just come to 
smash and even the journey to Fez was unsafe. Not that we should have cared: Coke was as brave 
as a lion about everything outside his dam and her devices; but the authorities would not hear of 
our leaving the city --- even the environs were beset by banditti. It was a great nuisance, especially 
as I had got ready for the desert by shaving my head and getting into my Eastern clothes. However, I 
consoled myself by making excursions after dark into the suburbs and courting all adventures that 
might come my way. I had in fact a perfectly gorgeous time. 
But poor Coke would not enter into the spirit of the East --- in which we humorously include a 
country whose name (Morocco, Al'Maghrabi) means west and whose most easterly point is in the 
longitude of Oxford. He was homesick for the dull uniformity of family life. That is, I believe, the 
heart of England's horror. Frank Harris has described English vices as "Adultery with home comforts". 
The average Englishman likes to drink tea in a pair of previously warmed soft slippers, with a 
smiling piece of meat presiding over the soggy toast, and unintelligent brats playing halma in the 
background. "The East" only means to him sunstroke, fever and other diseases, each more dreadful 
than the rest; people whose views do not interest him --- they are unintelligible and immoral; 
discomfort and boredom. He has no idea of abstract beauty and he is terribly afraid of meeting an 
idea which might stir his stagnant stupidity. 
To me every new scene, every new point of view, is welcome. I want to be taught. I want to enlarge 
my mind. Nihil humani a me alienum puto. Even so, humani is one word too many. As I wrote in The 
Book of Lies. 
The Chinese cannot help thinking that the octave has five notes. 
The more necessary anything appears to my mind the more certain it is that I only assert a 
limitation. 
It is natural that my attitude should be utterly abhorrent to my fellow countrymen. But they are 
quite wrong to think that my ideas are anti-Anglo-Saxon. They are anti-anything which imagines 
itself to have a monopoly of truth or propriety. 
I could not get Coke to take any interest in the people, their customs, their ideas and their art. The 
sunshine on the sparkling sea, the infinite variety of colour and form, the tingling mixture of races 
and religions meant nothing 
{549} 
to him. Beauty was literally splashed over life like a bucket of cold water over an athlete. Instead of 
exhilarating him, he shivered and moaned. He kept on groaning like a wounded animal: I want my 
wife! I want my children! Of course, what he really wanted was cocaine, and that was just the thing 
I did not want him to have. 
I had managed to get rid of his persecution mania for the time being. Whenever he noticed his 
mother flying past the moon on her broomstick, he would perform a banishing ritual, and sail out in 
his astral body on to the word and chop the broomstick like Siegfried with the lance of Wotan, and 
down she would fall into the Straits of Gibraltar, plop, plop. Nor did he suffer seriously from the 
suppression of cocaine. His only trouble was that his mind was so sodden with sentimentality that no 
amount of sunshine could restore its lightness and elasticity. If I had been able to take him into the 
desert for a couple of months he would have had to live through the purgatory involved in the 
absence of sour-faced snobbery and sneaking servility. 
Thanks to Muly Hafid, there was nothing for it but let him relapse into the slough of despond and 
stifle in the stinking slime of civilized society. I begged him to walk home from Gibraltar, but it 
merely gave the old delusions an excuse to renew their grip. He classed me as having joined the 
conspiracy against him of black magicians, from his mother and his neighbours to his son's 
schoolmaster (who had been persuaded by the devil to inflict one hundred lines of the Georgics 
upon the luckless lad!) and his family lawyer --- who had been persuaded by Belial to fail to lend 
him ten thousand pounds without security.