Confessions of Aleister Crowley

227 The blind bulk of the immeasurable beast ... bristling with intolerable hair lying in front of one, and feel that one has done a good turn to Venus. One of my boars, by the way, gave me a lesson in literature. I came across his body two days after the battle and it hit me in the eye --- to say nothing of the nose --- with Baudelaire's "Charogne". Beside the path, an infamous foul carrion, ....Stones for its couch a fitting sheet. Its legs stretched in the air, like wanton whores ....Burning with lust, and reeking venom sweated, Laid open, carelessly and cynically, the doors ....Of belly rank with exhalations fetid. {378} Upon this rottenness the sun shone deadly straight ....As if to cook it to a turn, And gave back to great Nature hundred-fold the debt ....That, joining it together, she did earn. The sky beheld this carcase most superb outspread ....As spreads a flower, itself, whose taint Stank so supremely strong, that on the grass your head ....You thought to lay, in sudden faint. The flies swarmed numberless on this putrescent belly, ....Whence issued a battalion Of larvae, black, that flowed, a sluggish liquid jelly, ....Along this living carrion. All this was falling, rising as the eager seas, ....Or heaving with strange crepitation --- There was an utterly unspeakable fascination in watching the waves of maggots. The surface undulated with the peculiar rhythm of the ocean. To Baudelaire, as we know, a similar sight suggested his "Inamorata". I was presumably too blindly in love with Rose to see the resemblance; the main impression on my mind was more impersonally philosophical. I thought of the 13th Key of the Tarot, of the sign of Scorpio, the invincible persistence of life perpetuating itself by means of that very putrefaction which seems to shallow minds the star witness against it. Here were vermin feeding on corruption, yet the effect was of lambent vibrations of white brilliance, disporting themselves in the sunlight --- here, quit! Am I a sportsman describing his heroic feats, or am I not? The elephant, "the half reasoner with the hand", is in an entirely different category from any other animal. I felt much more like a murderer when potting a hathi than when it is a monkey, though I perfectly understood the emotion of the average Englishman in this conjuncture. Nor is the elephant easy to shoot. The odds against hitting him in the vital spot are very great; and strange as it may sound, in country like Hambantota, he is very difficult to see at all. In the whole province there are really very few trees of notable stature, yet the undergrowth (including smaller trees) is so think and so high that it is rarely possible to see an animal even when one is close to him. I remember once being so near to an elephant that I could have prodded him with a salmon rod; but I could not see one inch of all his acres. He was feeding on small twigs; I could hear every gentle snap; I could hear his breathing; I could smell him. If he had taken it into his head to turn or if the wind had shifted, my number would have been up. He could have trampled his way to and over me without an effort, while I could not