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Aleister Crowley Diary Entry Thursday, 8 May 1902
On the 8th we proceeded to Olthingthang, a pretty long march. The road was a little more reasonable than the previous day, but a good deal of it was still very mad and bad. One stretch of several miles over a pari was exceptionally trying. It was broiling hot, and there was not a drop of water to be had anywhere; while the sun's heat came off the rock until one seemed as if in a furnace. But there was a delight to the eye marvellously marked on this day. In the midst of the naked hideousness of nature, wherever there had been a piece of ground sufficiently level, and a supply of water, cultivation had changed the ugliness of the Creator's design into an unconscious masterpiece of beauty. Imagine to yourself the tropical fervour of the heat, the dull drab of the rocks, the monotonous blue of the sky, and the sullen ugliness of the Indus with its dirty water running below your feet; then imagine yourself as if turning a corner and seeing in the midst of a new mass of rock a village. Ledge by ledge it would stretch down, clad in a brilliant and tender green, while cutting the horizontal lines of the irrigation channels, soared into the sky the magnificent masculine forms of poplars, and at their feet spread out the feminine and blossoming beauty of apricot trees. Village after village one passed, and was thrown every time into a fresh ecstasy of delight. There is a bitter disappointment, however, in store for the person who travels on this stage for the first time. The last pari is over; one sees a village in front nestling close to the Indus and watered by a large side stream which comes down in a succession of charming little cascades through a beautiful and verdant gorge—but unfortunately it is not the stage! Just as one is certain that the weary march is over one finds that nothing is further from the truth. One has to ride up again more than a thousand feet from the valley before one reaches Olthingthang.
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