The Greatest Works of Aleister Crowley. Aleister Crowley

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      So I had Lou all to myself until he came with the disguises the next day in the afternoon. And I wasn't going to waste a minute.

      I admit I was pretty sick about the way the white cloud let me down. I'd have gone after the silly old sun myself if I hadn't been a married man.

      However, there we were alone, alone for ever, Lou and I in Capri, it was all much too good to be true I Sunlight and moonlight and starlight! They were all in her eyes. And she handed out the cocaine with such a provocative gesture I I knew what it was to be insane. I could understand perfectly well why the silly fools that aren't insane are afraid of being insane. I'd been that way myself when I didn't know any better.

      This rotten little race of men measures the world by its own standard. It is lost in the vastness of the Universe, and is consequently afraid of everything that doesn't happen to fit its own limits.

      Lou and I had discarded the miserable measures of mankind. That sort of thing is all right for tailors and men of science ; but we had sprung in one leap to be conterminous with the Universe. We were as incommensurable as the ratio of a circle to its diameter. We were as imaginary and unreal from their point of view as the square root of minus one.

      We didn't ask humanity to judge us. It was simply a case of mistaken identity to regard us as featherless bipeds at all. We may have looked like human beings to their eyes ; in fact, they sent in bills and things as if we had been human beings.

      But I refuse to be responsible for the mistakes of the inferior animals. I humour them to some extent in their delusions, because they're lunatics and ought to be humoured. But it's a long way between that and admitting that their hallucinations have any basis in fact.

      I had been in their silly world of sense a million years or so ago, when I was Peter Pendragon.

      But why recall the painful past ? Of course, one doesn't come to one's full strength in a minute. Take the case of an eagle. What is it as long as it's in the egg ? Nothing but an egg with possibilities. And the first day it's hatched you don't expect it to fly to Neptune and back. Certainly not !

      But every day, in every way, it gets better and better. And if I was ever tempted to flop and remember my base origin as a forked radish, why all I needed was a kiss from Lou, or a sniff of cocaine to put me back in Paradise.

      I can't tell you about those next twenty-four hours. Suffice it to say that all world's records were broken and broken again. And we were simply panting like two hungry wolves when Feccles turned up with the disguises and the guns!

      He repeated those instructions, and added one word of almost paternal counsel in a very confidential tone.

      " You'll excuse me, I know; I'm not suggesting for a moment you're not perfectly capable of taking care of yourself, but you haven't been in these parts before, and you must never forget the quick, violent tempers of these Southern Italians. It's like one of these sudden gusts that the fishermen are so afraid of. It doesn't mean anything in particular; but it's often ugly enough at the moment, and what you have to do is to keep out of any kind of a row. There may be a lot of drunken ruffians in the Fauno Ebbrio. Sit near the door ; and if anybody starts scrapping, slip out quietly and walk up and down till it's over. You don't want to get mixed up with a fuss."

      I could see the wisdom of his remarks, although, on the other hand, I was personally spoiling for a fight. The one fly in the apothecary's ointment of the honeymoon, though I didn't notice it, was that something in me missed the excitement of the daily gambling with death to which the war had accustomed me.

      The slightest reminder of the wilder passions-a couple of boatmen quarrelling, or even a tourist protesting about some trifle, sent the blood to my head.

       I only wanted a legitimate excuse for killing a few hundred people.

      But nature is wise and kind, and I was always able to take it out of Lou. The passions of murder and love are inseparably connected in our ancestry. All civilisation has done is to teach us to pretend to idealise them.

      The programme went off without the slightest hitch. Our room opened on to a terrace in deep shadow. At this time of year there was hardly any one in the hotel, of course. A little flight of steps at the side of the terrace took us under an arch of twisted vines into the barely more than mule-path that does duty for a road in Capri.

      No one took any notice of us. There were only strolling lovers, parties of peasants singing as they walked to the guitar, and two or three tired happy fishermen strolling home from the wine-shop.

      We found the motor-boat at the quay, and lay lapsed in delight. It seemed hardly a minute later when we found ourselves in Sorrento couched in a huge roadster. Without a word spoken, we were off at top speed. The beauty of the drive is notorious; and yet

      "We were the first that ever burst Into that silent sea."

      The world had been created afresh for our sakes. It was an ever-changing phantasmagoria of rapturous sounds and sights and scents ; and it all seemed a mere ornamentation for our love, the setting for the jewel of our sparkling passion.

      Even the last few miles into Naples, where the road runs through tedious commercialised suburbs, took on a new aspect. The houses were a mere irregular skyline. Somehow they suggested the jagged contour of a score of Debussy.

      But all this, exquisite as it was, gripping as it was, was in a way superficial. At the bottom of our hearts there seethed and surged a white hot volcanic lake of molten, of infernal, metal.

      We did not know what hideous, what monstrous abominations were in store for us at the Gatto Fritto.

      I have set down how the action of the drugs had partially stripped off the recent layers of memory. It had achieved a parallel result much more efficiently on the moral plane. The toil of countless generations of evolution had been undone in a month. We still preserved, to a certain extent, the conventions of decency; but we knew that we did so only from ape-like cunning.

      We had reverted to the gorilla. No action of violence and lust but seemed a necessary outlet for our energies !

      We said nothing to each other about this. It was, in fact, deeper and darker than could be conveyed by articulate speech.

      Man differs from the lower animals indeed, first of all, in this matter of language. The use of language compels one to measure one's thoughts. That is why the great philosophers and mystics, who are dealing with ideas that cannot be expressed in such terms, are constantly compelled to use negative adjectives, or to rebuke the mind by formulating their thoughts in a series of contradictory statements. That is the explanation of the Athanasian Creed. Its clauses puzzle the plain man.

      One must oneself be divine to comprehend divinity,

      The converse proposition is equally true. The passions of the pit find outlet only in bestial noises.

      The automobile stopped at the end of the dirty little street where the Fauno Ebbrio lurks. The motorman pointed to the zig-zag streak of light that issued from it, and cast a sinister gleam on the opposite wall.

      A bold, black-haired, short-skirted girl with a gaudy shawl and huge gold ear-rings was standing in the door. What with the long journey and the drugs and other things, we were a little drunk-just enough to realise that it was part of our policy to pretend to be a little more drunk than we were.

      We let our heads roll from side to side as we staggered СКАЧАТЬ