BEINGS I HAVE SEEN 
357 
caused him to add: Would you rather be told, or learn by 
experience? I replied, instantly: I would rather learn by 
experience. Suiting the action to the word, I dashed forward, 
plunged into the clump, and learnt. 
This incident is the key to the puzzle of my character. But, 
as a child, what did I see? I cannot think of anyone person 
who subsequently devoted his life to Magick who has not at 
least one early experience of seeing angels, or fairies, or 
something of the sort. But A.C.? Nary a one. I was brought 
up on the Bible, a literalist, fundamentalist-all 
that a 
Plymouth Brother could wish. It never occurred to me to 
doubt a word of what I was told. Perhaps the Wolf's Tail of 
an healthy scepticism gleamed pale at the age of I 0, when I 
asked my form master how it was that Christ managed to be 
dead for three days and three nights between Friday night 
and Sunday morning. He said that he did not know, and (to a 
further question) that no one had ever explained it. This 
merely filled me with ambition to be the great exegetist who 
had explained it. I never thought of doubting the story. 
Well, all this time, and then through puberty, despite my 
romantic bent, my absorption in the gramarye of Sir Walter 
Scott, my imaginative life as one of his heroes, and the rest of 
it, I never had even a moment's illusion that anything of the 
sort had ever happened to me. I went through all the 
motions; I haunted all the places where such things are 
reputed likely to happen, but nothing did happen. 
There is one exception, and one only. 
It was in 1896, at Arolla in the Pennine Alps. I took my 
cousin , Gregor Grant, a fine climber but with little 
experience beyond scrambles, and in poor physical condition, 
for the second (first guideless) ascent of the N.N.E. ridge of 
Mont Collon, a long and exacting climb of more than average 
difficulty. I had to help him with the rope for most of the 
climb. This made us late. I dashed for the quickest way 
down, a short but very steep ridge with one decidedly bad 
patch, to the great snowfield at the head of the valley. At the 
bottom of the last pitch a scree-strewn slope, easy going, led