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Authors: Gary Lachman
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us. 17 Crowley’s moral superiority soon became a matter of concern and reappeared in a later climb. Dr. Guillarmod, who Crowley claimed “knew as little of mountains as he did of medicine,” had a different approach and set up a temporary clinic wherever they stopped, doing whatever he could to help people who rarely, if ever, saw a doctor. 18 Although Eckenstein was at least half German, Crowley referred toGuillarmod, Pfannl, and Wessely as “undesirable aliens,” and would have preferred to have more Englishmen about.
They started out optimistically but soon the odds seemed against them. The weather wasn’t promising, the terrain was grueling, and the sheer size of the Savage Mountain overwhelmed. Crowley had a flare-up of malaria and suffered from snow-blindness. His remedy for this, and for the exhaustion that overcame him, was to drink champagne. His fever was so bad that he hallucinated butterflies in the snow and he became paranoid about Knowles and threatened him with a pistol. Knowles didn’t trust Crowley and quickly disarmed him, keeping the pistol as a memento, a humiliation Crowley didn’t report in his
Confessions
. At one point Pfannl went mad (a condition he felt only Crowley could understand) and Wessely, who Crowley paints as a glutton, stole the food supplies; a court-martial was planned. On July 10 the party reached its highest point, but the weather had broken and promised to remain bad. The days for climbing farther were lost; even remaining where they were was exhausting. The Savage Mountain had beaten them; by August they were retreating down the glacier. It was Crowley’s first major defeat. Had he been successful, he would have been “the man who climbed K2” and the world would have known about it. He would have been established—and in many ways it is a shame the attempt was unsuccessful. We’ve seen that Crowley was at peace with himself only on the mountains. He devotes a large section of the
Confessions
to the expedition and it is clear that it meant a great deal to him.
But now he was once again a wanderer of the wastes, and he had to press on.
Crowley left Bombay en route to Paris in October 1902. He had spent the weeks after K2 shooting, traveling, and sightseeing. He stopped off at Cairo but avoided the pyramids, preferring instead thesophisticated entertainments at Shepheard’s Hotel, an Egyptian watering hole established in 1841 whose famous visitors included Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, and Noel Coward. Today Crowley is mentioned among its illustrious guests. 19 In Paris he stayed with his friend the painter Gerald Kelly. While Crowley had been traveling around the world, Kelly was establishing himself as an important artist. The two had been corresponding and Crowley, never one to flinch at asking favors, invited himself to visit. He of course wanted to touch base with his fellow Cambridge man, but the real reason for the visit was the serious business with Mathers. Bennett had answered his question and the way forward was open.
Crowley hoped to impress Mathers with his travels, his adventures, his knowledge of yoga, and his magical development. He wanted to be greeted as an equal, much as he wanted Yeats to greet him four years earlier. But when they met in Montmartre, where Mathers was living, his old master was singularly uninterested. In a letter to Kelly, Crowley anticipated this meeting as his Hour of Triumph, but the reunion was anticlimactic. Men such as Crowley and Mathers could not meet as equals and the tension was building. Crowley began his attack by inferring that Mathers had pawned an expensive dressing case and bag he had asked him to store while he was away. Mathers was as poor as ever and most likely did pawn them; this ignominious act lowered Mathers in Crowley’s eyes. Mathers had been in contact with the Secret Chiefs; of that Crowley had no doubt. But something had happened and he had fallen. Ironically, Crowley suggests Mathers’s fall
They started out optimistically but soon the odds seemed against them. The weather wasn’t promising, the terrain was grueling, and the sheer size of the Savage Mountain overwhelmed. Crowley had a flare-up of malaria and suffered from snow-blindness. His remedy for this, and for the exhaustion that overcame him, was to drink champagne. His fever was so bad that he hallucinated butterflies in the snow and he became paranoid about Knowles and threatened him with a pistol. Knowles didn’t trust Crowley and quickly disarmed him, keeping the pistol as a memento, a humiliation Crowley didn’t report in his
Confessions
. At one point Pfannl went mad (a condition he felt only Crowley could understand) and Wessely, who Crowley paints as a glutton, stole the food supplies; a court-martial was planned. On July 10 the party reached its highest point, but the weather had broken and promised to remain bad. The days for climbing farther were lost; even remaining where they were was exhausting. The Savage Mountain had beaten them; by August they were retreating down the glacier. It was Crowley’s first major defeat. Had he been successful, he would have been “the man who climbed K2” and the world would have known about it. He would have been established—and in many ways it is a shame the attempt was unsuccessful. We’ve seen that Crowley was at peace with himself only on the mountains. He devotes a large section of the
Confessions
to the expedition and it is clear that it meant a great deal to him.
But now he was once again a wanderer of the wastes, and he had to press on.
Crowley left Bombay en route to Paris in October 1902. He had spent the weeks after K2 shooting, traveling, and sightseeing. He stopped off at Cairo but avoided the pyramids, preferring instead thesophisticated entertainments at Shepheard’s Hotel, an Egyptian watering hole established in 1841 whose famous visitors included Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, and Noel Coward. Today Crowley is mentioned among its illustrious guests. 19 In Paris he stayed with his friend the painter Gerald Kelly. While Crowley had been traveling around the world, Kelly was establishing himself as an important artist. The two had been corresponding and Crowley, never one to flinch at asking favors, invited himself to visit. He of course wanted to touch base with his fellow Cambridge man, but the real reason for the visit was the serious business with Mathers. Bennett had answered his question and the way forward was open.
Crowley hoped to impress Mathers with his travels, his adventures, his knowledge of yoga, and his magical development. He wanted to be greeted as an equal, much as he wanted Yeats to greet him four years earlier. But when they met in Montmartre, where Mathers was living, his old master was singularly uninterested. In a letter to Kelly, Crowley anticipated this meeting as his Hour of Triumph, but the reunion was anticlimactic. Men such as Crowley and Mathers could not meet as equals and the tension was building. Crowley began his attack by inferring that Mathers had pawned an expensive dressing case and bag he had asked him to store while he was away. Mathers was as poor as ever and most likely did pawn them; this ignominious act lowered Mathers in Crowley’s eyes. Mathers had been in contact with the Secret Chiefs; of that Crowley had no doubt. But something had happened and he had fallen. Ironically, Crowley suggests Mathers’s fall
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