CHAPTER VII
THE WINGS OF THE OOF-BIRD
THE lunch at the Restaurant de la Cascade was like a
lunch in a dream. We seemed to be aware of what
we were eating without actually tasting it. As I think
I said before, it’s the anesthesia of cocaine that deter-
mines the phenomena.
When I make a remark like that, I understand that
it’s the dead and gone medical student popping up.
But never you mind that. The point is that when
you have the right amount of snow in you, you can't
feel anything in the ordinary sense of the word. You
appreciate it in a sort of impersonal way. There’s a
pain, but the pain doesn’t hurt. You enjoy the fact
of the pain as you enjoy reading about all sorts of
terrible things in history at school.
But the trouble about cocaine is this; that it’s
almost impossible to take it in moderation as almost
any one, except an American, can take whisky. Every
dose makes you better and better. It destroys one’s
power of calculation.
We had already discovered the fact when we found
that the supply we had got from Gretel, with the idea
that it would last almost indefinitely, was running very
short, when the dressing-gown came to solve the
problem.
We had only been a few days on the stunt, and what
we had got from three or four sniffs, to begin with, meant
almost perpetual stoking to carry on. However, that
didn’t matter, because we had an ample supply. There
must have been a couple of kilograms of either C. or
H. in that kimono. And when you think that an eighth
of a grain is rather a big dose of H., you can easily
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