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of St. Paul’s Cathedral. The Potala would dominate
London,— Lhasa it simply eclipses. B y European standards
it is impossible to judge this building ; there is
nothing there to which comparison can be made.
Perhaps in the austerity of its huge curtains of blank,
unveiled, unornamented wall, and in the flat, unabashed
slants of its tremendous south-eastern face there is a
suggestion of the massive grandeur of Egyptian work ;
but the contrast of colour and surroundings, to which
no small part of the magnificence of the sight is due,
Egypt cannot boast.
The vivid white stretches of the buttressing curtains
of stone, each a wilderness of close-ranked windows
and the home of the hundreds of crimson-clad dwarfs
who sun themselves at the distant stairheads, strike a
clean and harmonious note in the sea of green which
washes up to their base. Once a year the walls of the
Potala are washed with white, and no one can gainsay the
effect; but there is yet the full chord of colour to be
sounded. The central building of the palace, the Phodang
Marpo, the private home of the incarnate divinity himself,
stands out four-square upon and between the wide
supporting bulks of masonry a rich red-crimson, and,
most perfect touch of all, over it against the sky the
glittering golden roofs— a note of glory added with the
infinite taste and the sparing hand of the old illuminator
— recompose the colour scheme from end to end, a
sequence of green in three shades, of white, of maroon,
of gold and of pale blue. The brown yak-hair curtain,
eighty feet in height and twenty-five across, hangs like
a tress of hair down the very centre of the central
sanctuary hiding the central recess. Such is the Potala.
In a way it recalls the dominion of the Shwe Dagon over