And here perhaps one may digress into one of the most interesting of Tibetan industries, that of the mass production of prayers. The greatest aim of every truly religious son of Lamaism is to present the gods with the greatest number of prayers possible and, to do this, as in the case of all-in wrestling, every method is a fair one. The first. method, of course, is the normal vocal one, On horseback the dutiful Tibetan may often be heard to give forth a continuous and monotonous chant for hours on end, the separate syllable: spoken every prayer written on the stones. Thus, on going from Litang to Kantzu, say, one rides to the left of every pile; on the return journey one keeps to the right. And so all the prayers in all the piles have been said. One the other hand, when travelling on a circuitous route one keeps always to the left of the piles, with the same excellent result, And now, before leaving our discussion of this industry, there is a vital warning, the motion must in every case be from left to right. Let the revolution be but once in the wrong direction and every prayer that was ever prayed by that particular instrument be Automatically cancelled. It is as though one had pulled up the bath-plug instead of turning on the tap.
A_ short way beyond the manidrombo Hsiihsisungtu was reached, with its big fortress. After a vicious downpour of hail we camped on a coarse cobble fan by the stream and in due course were paid a visit by the local Tu Se. He was a saturnine individual who, sitting gravely on the ground in our tent sudden-produced ian alarm clock from his capacious gown. At first we thought this was intended as a feat of prestidigitation, the Tibetan equiva-|—lent of our own "rabbit from the hat," but it turned out that something was wrong with the works, and he wanted it put right. My companion is a genius with his hi nds, and in five minutes the thing wa repaired, Without uttering even so much as a "Hey Presto" the chief suddenly produced a small musical-box from the same locality. This also refused to perform. It was a nicely jade little contraption, made in Paris, and labeled "A deux airs."
This was more of a problem. But in 20 minutes we heard a crystal inkling and a charming Gallic melody filled the tent with its tiny clamour, My companion looked anxiously at the Tu Se's bosom, and from his own there arose a sigh of relief. The conjuring entertainment was over,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.