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Aleister Crowley Diary Entry Tuesday, 2 June 1936
[sigil: as previously, 3 adjacent triangles connected by a straight line across their bases] & V.I. [Gerald Yorke] to lunch.
[clipping about penguin eggs] Hard-boiled, one of the half-million formed part of my lunch yesterday. To boil one ordinarily takes 20 minutes: it is about 3 times as big as a hen's egg. The "white" is a beautiful translucent sage-greenish hue, like verdantigue or an antarctic lagoon. Penguins bray like jackasses; have quillless wings; eat sardines & clipfish: share such picturesquely named houses as Plumpudding Island with cormorant, gannet, whitebreasted duiker, mutton-bird, oyster-catcher, sand-plover, sanderling, ruff, turnstone, mollymawk. Anti-penguin, eager to grab egg or chick, is ex-sacred ibis.
Altogether my lunch was memorably exotic: cooked by host himself in a Bloomsbury flat. He gave us chilli con carne—Mexican dish so hot that it makes strong men weep. With it were four "side-dishes"—concoctions based on (a) red macassar fish & poppy-seed (b) tamarind-fish (c) Burmese balichow made from rotten prawns (bottled, very Spilsburyesque) (d) Kasoondee—minced mango in spiced oil.
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