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and one that causes no great scandal even among
the strictest disciples of Lamaism, though it is regarded
as a concession to the weaker brethren. This part
of Tibet has a Red Cap colony, and the ash-gray, white
and Indian-red perpendicular stripes that characterise
the buildings of this community form for miles a
peculiarity in the landscape and strikingly relieve its
monotony.
Of that monotony, the dead sameness of mountain
tracks across the top of the world, it is hard to give
any idea. The blue sky, of a clearness and depth of
colour that no less altitude can give, vaults over the
slippery hill-sides between which the thin stream
cataracts or spreads itself in runlets across a waste
of sand. There is no verdure at that time of the year
except that which is artificially grown on the river-
flats where the valley is wide enough. Rich umber
and light red, seamed and filmed with gray purples
of the clefts; bald ochre of spurs that thrust the water
from their fe e t; bare red of whip-like willows growing
over a mud w a ll; coarse grit-coloured road, here grayish
with slate, here dun with granite, there again rufous
with a floor of limestone—these are all the colours
except here and there, when one meets a hurrying
lama, wrapped in his habit of dull maroon. As the
sun sets the richer pigments, beaten all day by his
rays into the hot hill-sides, are cooled out of the rock's ;
and as the sunlight is slowly lost in the valleys below
a faint orange gauze spreads and reddens into carmine
on the far snowy peaks to the north-east.
One side of the river is like the other ; you may
cross it anywhere and find the same view, the same
road. Perhaps Long-ma, well-placed upon a bluff over