or four
Tibetans got up and signed to me to be off. I pretended not to
understand, and, after a heated discussion, I was allowed to remain.

An operation was obviously being performed by a Tibetan medicine-man, and
the suspense in the crowd round the sick man was considerable. The doctor
was busy preparing combustible fuses, which he wrapped up carefully in
silk paper. When cut in the centre they formed two cones, each with a
little tail of twisted paper protruding beyond its summit. Having
completed six or eight of these, the medicine-man made his patient, or
rather his victim, assume a sitting posture. I inquired what ailed the
sick man. From what they told me, and from an examination made on my own
account, I was satisfied that the man was suffering from an attack of
lumbago. The coming cure, however, interested me more than the illness
itself, and the doctor, seeing how absorbed I was in the performance,
asked me to sit by his side. First of all the man called for "fire," and
a woman handed him a blazing brand from a fire near by. He swung it to
and fro in the air, and pronounced certain exorcisms. Next the patient
was subjected to a thorough examination, giving vent to a piercing yell
each time that the long bony fingers of the physician touched his sides,
whereupon the man of science, pointing to the spot, informed his
open-mouthed audience that the pain was "there." Putting on a huge pair
of spectacles, he rubbed with the palm of his hand the umbilical region
of the sufferer and then measured with folded thumb two inches on each
side of, and slightly under, the umbilicus. To mark these distances he
used the burning brand, applying it to the flesh at these points.

"_Murr, murr!_" ("Butter, butter!") he next called for, and butter was
produced. Having rubbed a little on the burns, he placed upon each of
them a separate cone, and pressed until it remained a fixture, the point
upwards. Shifting the beads of a rosary, revolving the praying-wheel, and
muttering prayers, the medicine-man now worked himself into a perfect
frenzy. He stared at the sun, raising his voice from a faint whisper to a
thundering baritone at its loudest, and his whole audience seemed so
affected by the performance that they all shook and trembled and prayed
in their terror. He now again nervously clutched the burning wood in one
hand, and, blowing upon it with the full strength of his lungs, produced
a flame. The excitement in the crowd became