e Lamasery of Kounboum,
Sandara was the patron and introducer of the Chinese hawkers who deal in
these contraband articles, and aided them in the sale of their goods, for
a small commission.

A few days after the Feast of Flowers, we vigorously resumed our
Thibetian studies under the direction of Sandara, who came every morning
to work with us. We occupied ourselves in the translation of an
abridgment of Sacred History from the creation to the preaching of the
Apostles. We gave to this work the dialogue form; the two interlocutors
being a Lama of Jehovah and a Lama of Buddha. Sandara fulfilled his
functions altogether as a matter of business. The favourable tendencies
which he at first manifested, when we were at Tang-Keou-Eul, his
crossings, his admiration of the Christian doctrine, had been all a mere
farce. Religious feelings had no hold upon his grasping, hardened heart.
He had acquired, by his long abode among the Chinese, a sneering,
cold-blooded, carping incredulity, which he seemed to delight in parading
upon all occasions. In his estimation, all religions were so many
devices invented by the wise for the more facile and effective
despoilment of the witless. Virtue, with him, was a vain word, and the
man of merit, he who made the most of his fellow men.

Despite, however, these sceptical and impious opinions, Sandara could not
prevent himself from feeling high admiration of the Christian doctrine.
He was especially struck with the concatenation of the historical facts
which he translated for us. He found in them a character of
authenticity, of which the fables accumulated in the Buddhist books are
wholly destitute; he admitted this, not unfrequently, but always in an
unguarded moment, for his aim was to support in our presence his
melancholy part of a free-thinker. When he was with the Lamas, he was
more at his ease; and there he did not hesitate to declare that as to
religious doctrine, we knew more about it than all the living Buddhas put
together.

After some time, we began to make a certain sensation in the Lamasery;
the Lamas talked a good deal to one another about the two Lamas of
Jehovah, and the new doctrine they taught. It was remarked that we were
never seen to prostrate ourselves before Buddha; that, thrice a day, we
said prayers which were not Thibetian prayers; that we had a language of
our own, which nobody else understood, but that with other people we
talked Tartarian, Chinese, and a