Amban himself, knew that he had gone. I can imagine the awed
attendants, the burying of treasure, the locking and sealing of chests,
faint lights flickering in the passages, hurried footsteps in the
corridors, dogs barking intermittently at this unwonted bustle--I feel
sure the Priest-King kicked one as he stepped on the terrace for the
last time. Then the procession by moonlight up the narrow valley to the
north, where the roar of the stream would drown the footsteps of the
palanquin-bearers.

A month afterwards I followed on his track, and stood on the Phembu Pass
twelve miles north of Lhasa, whence one looks down on the huge belt of
mountains that lie between the Brahmaputra and the desert, so packed
and huddled that their crests look like one continuous undulating plain
stretching to the horizon. Looking across the valley, I could see the
northern road to Mongolia winding up a feeder of the Phembu Chu. They
passed along here and over the next range, and across range after range,
until they reached the two conical snow-peaks that stand out of the
plain beside Tengri Nor, a hundred miles to the north. For days they
skirted the great lake, and then, as if they feared the Nemesis of our
offended Raj could pursue them to the end of the earth, broke into the
desert, across which they must be hurrying now toward the great mountain
chain of Burkhan Buddha, on the southern limits of Mongolia.

LHASA,
_August 19._

The Tibetans are the strangest people on earth. To-day I discovered how
they dispose of their dead.

To hold life sacred and benefit the creatures are the laws of Buddha,
which they are supposed to obey most scrupulously. And as they think
they may be reborn in any shape of mammal, bird, or fish, they are kind
to living things.

During the morning service the Lamas repeat a prayer for the minute
insects which they have swallowed inadvertently in their meat and drink,
and the formula insures the rebirth of these microbes in heaven.
Sometimes, when a Lama's life is despaired of, the monks will ransom a
yak or a bullock from the shambles, and keep him a pensioner in their
monastery, praying the good Buddha to spare the sick man's life for the
life ransomed. Yet they eat meat freely, all save the Gelug-pa, or
Reformed Church, and square their conscience with their appetite by the
pretext that the sin rests with the outcast assassin, the public
butcher, who will be born in the next incarnation as some