aborigines, this guild presents a study which cannot fail
to be of interest to the ethnologist : the more ordinary
traveller will soon have seen sufficient of this loathsome
tribe.*
These men compose the only community peculiar to
Lhasa. For the rest, lay and cleric alike, the inhabitants
are similar to those of the rest of Tibet. There
This is an example— the best in Lhasa— of the famous horn-masonry which is characteristic
of the place, and noted by every traveller to the city.
is indeed but one difference even in the dress. In the
province of Tsang, as will be remembered, the women
use a turquoise studded halo as a head-dress ; in Lhasa
a fillet ornamented in the same way is bound close doWn
over their Madonna-parted hair. The two braids are
* They are, as a rule, considered outcast from every profession or circle except
their own, but on one occasion the Dalai Lama enlisted the Ragyabas into the
Lhasa regiment to replace the losses which that corps had sustained at Guru.
