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Aleister Crowley Diary Entry Tuesday, 3 June 1902
On the 3rd I spent most of the evening with Eckenstein [Oscar Eckenstein] weighing out the flour supply and painting the sacks.
The great difficulty in undertaking a journey through uninhabited country is that a coolie, though carrying flour only, will eat his own load in about twenty days, consequently the limit to which you can take the men is only ten days out and back. Our Baltis, luckily, could do a great deal more than this. As it turned out, our final camp was fourteen marches from Askoli, and of course this left a very small margin for carrying our own baggage. We had about one hundred loads in all; but this required the constant employment of nearly 300 coolies. Practically every man in the village (and, indeed, in the valley) able to carry a load was in our service. During our absence from Askoli we consumed more than five tons of flour.
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