Returning on the following day, Mr. Claude White
and I made a careful tour of inspection through all
the buildings of the place, being received by the
monks with the utmost hospitality. In many ways
this temple stands on a plane of its own, and is not
entirely typical of other similar structures in the
country, but it was more interesting therefore to make
such close acquaintance with an institution unique
in the world. Going among the white-washed houses
at the foot of the monastery, I took the photograph
which appears opposite ; it will give a better idea than
any description could of the essential difference which
distinguishes this little community from that of almost
every other district in Tibet. It might almost be part of
an Italian town in those very Marches of Ancona from
which the Capuchin community of Lhasa was drawn.
In the early days of the eighteenth century, some
fleeting memory of far-distant Macerata may well have
home-sickened for a moment Costantino or Beligatti
as the pair turned in from the wide, flat Plain of Milk
towards the wooded little temple of the chief wizard.
The temple itself may be reached either from the
left, or more directly up the sharp flight of steps which
faces the reader in the picture here. To the main
entrance, that to the left, the visitor makes his way
circuitously, passing beside a luxuriant little plantation
of deep grass, where rambling shrubs and trees grow so
thickly that they almost make a twilight round their
stems. As I was passing this on orie occasion there
was a sound from the hidden depths of the wood which
was like nothing in the world so much as the subter-
ranean..roar which heralds Fafner’s unwieldy entrance.
I suppose that really some of the younger monks were The white, Italian-like houses of the wizard community of the Na-chung Chos-kyong at Lhasa.