Confessions of Aleister Crowley

87 Easter the hotel was overcrowded; and five of us, including Eckenstein and myself, were sleeping in the barn. One of Eckenstein's greatest friends was Mrs. Bryant, whose beautiful death between Chamonix and Montanvers in 1922 was the crown of a noble life. She had brought her niece, Miss Nichols, who to intrepidity on rocks added playfulness in less austere surroundings. I formally accuse her of putting a kitten under Eckenstein's pillow in the barn while we were in the smoking- room after dinner. If it had been a cobra Eckenstein could not have been more upset! He had also an idiosyncrasy about artificial scent. One day my wife and a friend came home from shopping. They had called at the chemist's who had sprayed them with "Shem-el-nessim". We saw them coming and went to the door to receive them. Eckenstein made one rush --- like a bull --- for the window of the sitting-rrom, flung it open and spent the next quarter of an hour leaning out and gasping for breath. Eckenstein was a great connoisseur of puzzles. It is extremely useful, by the way, to be able to occupy the mind in such ways when one has not the conveniences or inclination for one's regular work, and there is much time to kill in a hotel or a tent in bad weather. Personally, I have found chess solitaire and triple-dummy bridge or skat as good as anything. Eckenstein was a recognized authority on what is known as Kirkwood's schoolgirl problem, but we used to work all sorts of things, from problems connected with Mersenne's numbers and Fermat's binary theorem to the purely frivolous attempt to represent any given number by the use of the number four, four times --- neither more nor less, relating them by any of the accepted symbols of mathematical operations. Thus: 18 = 4 (4.4) + .4 38 = 14 + . + 4 106 = ł4 + 4.4 .4 128 = 44ö4-Sq.Rt.of  4 his has been done up to about 170, with the exception of the number 113, and thence to 300 or thereabouts with only a few gaps. I solved 113 with the assistance of Frater Psi and the sue of a subfactorial, fur Eckenstein would not admit the use of this symbol as fair. He was also interested in puzzles involving material apparatus, one of which seems worth mention. He was in Mysore and a travelling conjurer sold him a whole bundle of more or less ingenious tricks. One of these consisted simply of two pieces of wood; one a board with a hole in it, the other shaped somewhat like a dumb-bell, the ends being much too big to go through the hole. Eckenstein said that he was almost ready to swear that he saw the man take them up separately and rapidly put them together, {160} in which condition he had them and was never able to take them apart. He explored the surface minutely for signs of complexity of structure but without success. I never saw the toy, he having sent it to Mr. W. W. Rouse Ball, a great authority on such matters, but also baffled in this case. We were naturally always interested in any problems concerned with the working out of a difficult route, and here his probity on one occasion made him the victim of an unscrupulous child of Shaitan. The villain appeared in the guise of an old and valued friend, saying "Is it possible to reach Q from P (mentioning two places in London) without passing a public house?" Eckenstein accordingly took his walks in that direction and after endless trouble discovered a roundabout way which fulfilled the condition. Communicating the joyful news, his friend replied, "Good for you! Here's something else. Can you get to the Horseshoe, Tottenham Court Road, from here without passing a public house?" I do not know how many pairs of alpine boots Eckenstein wore out on the problem, before asking his friend, "Can it be done?" A telegram assured him that it could. More boots went the way of all leather and then he gave up. "It's perfectly easy," said the false friend, don't pass them --- go in!"