on to the east along the northern bank of the Tsang-
po, threading through fields of grain and sometimes
through villages nestling among trees. Far across the
river in the long distances there were heaped up sand-
drifts, nine hundred feet high, against the mountain
precipices, and now and then a slow dust rose from
them towards a white silver slant of threaded rain,
caught like a skein of spun silk in front of the heavy
indigo clouds. Ten minutes later the storm would
come to us also, but passed as suddenly as it came.
Here the signs which befit the last stages of a
pilgrim’s road were beginning to increase in number
and in beauty. It was not merely that, as always in
Tibet, one found beside a village, at a cleft in the rock-
side, at the crossing of a stream, on every place which
looks a likely home of devils, a rain-washed string of
flags, or a gaily-decked brush of ten-foot willow sprigs,
but from here until its end, besides the great Buddhas
cut deep into the point of each spur, round or over
which it drives its stony course, innumerable mantras
are cut in light relief upon every offering stone along the
road. “ Om mani fiadme hum ; ” the monotonous ejaculation
seemed to cry out from rock to rock “ This is
the way of salvation ; by this alone shall you escape
from earth.” *
Before we reached the point which hides Chusul,
Gonkar jong, where the Sinchen Lama was done to
death, was conspicuous on a little bluff five or six miles
down stream, and the sight of it brought tears to the
* An occasional sequence of colours for the six syllables of this mantra at
Chusul, and later on also a t Ne-tang,is white, blue, yellow, green, red and black •
but from continuous notes I am able to say that white, green, yellow, blue, red and
indigo (rarely black or purplish blue) is beyond comparison the commonest
sequence of colour throughout the country.
A rock-cut Buddha near Lhasa, ;To give the size, a man leaning over a rock to the left may
be pointed out.
VOL. II. 10