FOLLOW A WORD THROUGH THE COLLECTION
Search the corpus.
Phrase search ignores case and repeated whitespace. All-words search finds whole words anywhere on the same page. OCR errors can affect results.
3,167 matching pages
Page 154 of 1591929 · PDF PAGE 251
…arge number. He was in love with my wife, chiefly because she treated him with such disgust and contempt. He had proposed to her several times a week, even before her first marriage, and he saw no reason why he should abandon this habit merely on account of Major Skerrett and myself. I don't know why I tolerated him; I don't know why anyone tolerated him. Perhaps it was the subconscious feeling that one cannot be unkind to anything so pitiable. On April 27th, the good Tartarin, who had published a book (in the Swiss language) on our expedition …
1929 · PDF PAGE 293
…t pain that I was able to communicate with him at all. I cross-examined him, of course very severely, as to his religion. It took a long time for him to grasp my meaning; but ultimately he reassured me as to his creed, which was this: "John Wesley all same God." He was so besotted with drink and drugs that his human qualities, if he ever possessed any, were completely in abeyance. His name was soon corrupted into "Janwar" --- which is Hindustani for "wild animal". The journey to Yunnanfu was unique in my life in one important respect. I became …
1929 · PDF PAGE 85
…s of his study with him to France, for the sake of their familiarity. The mystery intrigued Eckenstein immensely and he returned several times to the house. A month or so later he found the two servants had returned. The master was expected back in the spring. They denied all knowledge of any such lady as described; and there the mystery rests, save that some considerable time later Eckenstein received a letter, unsigned, in evidently disguised handwriting. It contained a few brief phrases to the effect that the writer was sorry, but it could n…
1929 · PDF PAGE 98
…rom Christian D. Ginsburg's essay "The Kabbalah; Its Doctrines, Development and Literature". These practices appear to be endemic to the time. made to work by those who understand and know how to apply them. Shallow critics argue that because the average untrained man cannot evoke a spirit, the ritual which purports to enable him to do so must be at fault. He does not reflect that an electroscope would be useless in the hands of a savage. Indubitably, Magick is one of the subtlest and most difficult of the sciences and arts. There is more oppor…
1929 · PDF PAGE 254
…had seen the river before, higher up, and it is not particularly exciting, but here it flowed gigantically across a vast desolation. The time was sunset, the turbid water glowed with angry reds and oranges. There was an evil coppery sheen upon its waveless turmoil. Its breadth possessed a horror of its own; it was like a river of hell. Far away it reached to the right and left. There was nothing to break the horizon. I gave the desolate effect of ocean, but the boundlessness of the open sea suggests liberty. This river had told of barrenness an…
1929 · PDF PAGE 479
…ttle my affairs in New York, where I had been dodging starvation for five years. That legend of my growing fat on German gold! I lost no time in coming home to England. But I was not at ease. I was fed up with human beings. I resolved to disappear into the desert and give myself wholly to the religious life. I knew that my personal friends in England would understand what I had done in America: they would perhaps be proud of me. So far, so good. But I supposed, from the conversation of some genuinely intelligent Englishmen in high official posi…
1929 · PDF PAGE 241
…I need not go into them more deeply in this place . But the subsequent events of my life will furnish constant illustration of how every time I violated the Law, as I sometimes did with what I was ass enough to call the noblest motives, I got myself into a mess --- and failed to benefit those on whose behalf I had chosen to make a fool of myself. {402} 50 It is part of my character to rest on my oars at the very moment when a spurt would take me past the post. I begin to be recognized as the one poet in England: "Good," I say to myself, "I need…
1929 · PDF PAGE 167
…ce of any ignorant and indifferent House of Commons. The stupid callousness of the India Office is as much to be dreaded as the silly sentimentalism of sympathizers with "national aspirations", "the brotherhood of man" and all such bunkum. In India the rules of caste assured the poorest peasant a livelihood of sorts, bar famine and plague, and the future of his children was as certain as sunrise. In Anglo-Saxon civilization no one has any guarantee against economic earthquakes and the future of his family is pure gambling. Such is the price of …
1929 · PDF PAGE 259
…as careful not to overwork them. I gave a prize to the first three men to come into camp every day and those who had come in first three times had their pay permanently raised. I made friends with them, too, by sitting with them round the camp fire and exchanging songs and stories. On the other hand, I made it clear that I would tolerate no nonsense. They responded for the most part very well, I never had any trouble in all my wanderings with natives, servants, dogs and women. The secret is that I am really unconscious of superiority and treat …
1929 · PDF PAGE 153
… pagoda. One was the freak of misfortune; the other the considered climax of colossal care. Yet both were transitory and trivial toys of time. I went back to Rangoon profoundly penetrated by the insight which enabled the Buddha to attain understanding of the import of the cosmos. Ever since leaving Ceylon I had been almost constantly down with malaria. In Rangoon the fever assumed a remittent form: I lived on quinine and iced champagne. The persistence of the disease brought me to a state in which I not longer struggled to recover my ordinary h…
1929 · PDF PAGE 576
…tin Harrison. All three failed me! If I have survived, it is that the gods have some further use for me. My own efforts break down every time, and that in circumstances such that the improbability of their doing so is enormous. The one miracle matches the other. If I were even tempted to doubt that my career is planned in every detail by my spiritual superiors with the precision of a chess player whose pieces are powerless to move except at his command, incidents of this surprising kind would bring me back with a jerk to a sense of reality. {91…
1929 · PDF PAGE 223
…ow flame of the candle was like a blasphemy, and I put it out. The astral light remained during the whole of the invocation and for some time afterwards, though it lessened in intensity as we composed ourselves to sleep. For the rest, the floor of the King's Chamber is particularly uncompromising. In sleeping out on rocks, one can always accommodate oneself more or less to the local irregularities, but the King's Chamber reminded me of Brand; and I must confess to having passed a very uncomfortable night. I fear me dalliance had corrupted my Ro…
1929 · PDF PAGE 342
…as if I had lived there before; I knew what I was coming to so accurately that I could hardly doubt that I had really lived there at one time or another. I remembered nothing of the {553} circumstances; except that it must have been my habit to go to the western tower and look over the valley, the town somnolent at the foot of the hill, and the distant sierra, while the sun sank superbly sad among clouds which seemed to have borrowed their softness and brilliance from swansdown. Coke and I arranged to see the dancing of the gypsies who lived in…
1929 · PDF PAGE 257
… didn't. At Akyab one puts one's head under water in the hope of getting out of the wet; at Darjeeling one's head is under water all the time. But on that ghastly ridge, I met a quality and quantity of bat weather that I had never dreamt of in my wildest nightmares. What follows sounds exaggerated. On getting into a dak baghla and standing stripped in front of a roaring fire, one expects to get dry. But no! the dampness seems to be metaphysical rather than physical. The mere removal of the manifestations of the elements of water do not leave on…
1929 · PDF PAGE 463
…t absorb more than one tenth or at most one eighth of one's earning. In New York, this proportion is rarely less than one fourth and sometimes more than on third. Again, despite all efforts to establish a satisfactory system of transport, conditions are appalling. In the rush hours, the people are crushed like corn in a mill. One sees clusters of citizens hanging to the steps of a trolley car like a swarm of bees. The surface traffic is practically paralysed. I have know it take fifty minutes for a motor bus to get from 34th to 58th Street, wal…
1907 · PDF PAGE 249
… wind, i. 184 Moreover (just a word) this chance, iii. 18 Mortal distrust of mortal happiness, i. 182 Mortals are not for nectar all the time, ii. 80 Mortals never learn from stories, i. 156 My beauty in thy deep pure love, i, 108 My comedy has changed its blithe aspect, li. 74 My dreams are sweet, i. 14 My head is split. The crashing axe, ili. 85 My heavy hair upon my olive skin, i. 6 My home is set between two ivory towers, ii. 2 My little lady light o” limb, ili. 116 My soul is aching with the sense of sound, i, 113 NAKED as dawn, the purpos…
1929 · PDF PAGE 397
…was done by his purchasing the number of copies necessary to reduce my stock to ninety. He refused to understand my objections to his pastime of testing the intelligence of bank clerks in the matter of judging whether his imitation of my endorsement would pass muster. He indignantly withdrew from the proposed company and I saw him no more. Not till long after did I discover that all this time while he was living on my bounty he had indefatigably intrigued against me. For insidious cunning he was unrivalled. He had insinuated a thousand malignan…
1929 · PDF PAGE 410
… there is no fertile country anywhere near it. It consists of a cluster of Arab huts in the gap of a coliseum. This structure was at one time the headquarters of a formidable gang of brigands and the gap was made by the artillery sent to smoke them out. The point is that this coliseum is a tremendous affair. The old town must have sheltered at least five thousand people, more likely four times than number. How did these people live? One is bound to assume that in those days the country was fertile. In the absence of rivers, this means regular a…
1929 · PDF PAGE 547
…bled consent and then my heart smote me. It was rather rough to ask a woman to take that uncomfortable journey to a place, which at that time of the year was frequented chiefly by the devil and the more favoured of the damned for hell on account of the heat. So I wired and wrote proposing Tunis instead. She never received this message. I stayed a fortnight in Tunis wondering where she could be. She sweated in Bou Sada equally perplexed. In the end she decided to come to Cefalu. The Ape and I met her at Palermo and took her to the abbey --- and…
1929 · PDF PAGE 481
…ho read it over, ad hoc, might have taken it to mean that Mr Jones was a sodomite. Mr Jones ought to have known better than to waste his time in reading papers of this class. He ought to have known much better than to take any notice of such rubbish. He ought to have known very much better than to air his grievance in a court of law. His youngest baby ought to have known better than to employ a personal friend with no experience of such cases to act as his solicitor. And one would have thought that even such a solicitor would have known better …