eryone pours in anything he or she happens to have; there will
certainly be rice, both cooked and raw, peas, perhaps fish, and this may
be wrapped up in a leaf to keep it separate, which is necessary when it
is curried; then there will be some cakes or cucumbers; possibly, in the
season, mangoes and plantains. One of the greatest delicacies of the
Burmese is a horribly smelly stuff called _ngape_, made of rotten fish
laid in salt; no feast is complete without it.

The monks are supposed to live on what they get in their begging-bowls,
but, as a matter of fact, in wealthy monasteries they don't; they empty
it out for the pariah dogs, which explains why so many dogs always hang
around the monasteries.

The Burmese have some funny notions; one is that they do not like anyone
else's feet to be above their heads, so they build their houses on posts
and do not use the ground floor. It looks as if there were many more
storeys rising above the first floor where they live, but that is a
sham; the roof is only built to look like that, and is hollow inside. In
most of the monasteries there are schools, and the little boys are
taught in them, as you see here. Besides this, every boy, when he gets
to a certain age, must spend a time, longer or shorter, in the
monastery. It may be only a few days or weeks and it may be years,
according to the ideas of his parents, but while he is there he has to
wear the yellow robe and carry the begging-bowl, and what to a growing
boy must be most trying of all, he is not allowed to eat anything after
midday!

That old fellow has caught sight of us; he is getting up and seems quite
pleased to welcome us. It is a good thing we brought Ramaswamy with us,
for he can speak Burmese and interpret for us; the monk knows no
English. The little boys spring to their feet and stand gazing at us
with wide eyes, delighted, as any boys would be, at getting an
interruption to their lessons. They gradually come round us and begin to
laugh and even to touch our clothes, but the old monk sends them all
away and leads us into the wooden rooms of the monastery that open off
the verandah. Several monks here are lying lazily about on mats
half-asleep, but in a moment they all surround us, and for the first few
minutes we experience rather an eerie sensation. Coming in from the
bright sunshine outside everything seems very dim, and these curious men
with their shaven heads and beetle eyes come close up to us and press