Adele and the Doctor had little appreciation for the crude colors, or the terrific din. The latter, finding himself an unwilling listener to a “Rhapsodie Lamanesque” on drums, searched for something to stuff in his ears to soften the sound; he would have been willing to put his fist in the bell of the leading trumpet, but such things were inopportune. The effect was startling in the extreme; so very abrupt after the exquisite tone-color contrasts they had just been admiring. In fact, even their Manchu ponies halted, and wagged their ears to shake off the sound. Adele’s animal turned one ear backward and the other forward in astonishment.
Adele gave a new twist to the old line: “Where every prospect pleases and only the music is vile.”
Miss Winchester’s churchly expectations received a severe shock, for in this Cathedral monks were grotesque; but still they were monks, although the ideal peaceful life of a monk did not appear.
Curiosity got the better of Paul; he was off his pony and confabbing with the Lamas before the others had recovered from their amazement. A Lama took off his mask to allow his own voice to be heard more distinctly. He was a young fellow and rather good-looking, although shaven with a tonsure; and quite as healthy in appearance as many a monk who advocated asceticism. In fact, he seemed to be enjoying the racket and also the masquerade. They were all of them, the Lamas, not unlike a party of children playing at “theatre” in a nursery.
“Come,” said Paul, “we are invited to enter—it is one of your chapels, Adele.”
The Taoist Temple was an unpretentious, one-storied structure, of small dimensions, with projecting eaves. To the heathen inquisitives who accepted this invitation, it proved to be a curio shop without and within. Under the eaves were set vertically, into the front and side walls, cylinders about two feet high and a foot in diameter each, a double row, each cylinder held in position by a vertical spindle through the middle. The double rows extended around these three sides of the building.
The Chief Lama entered by the central door, the foreign heathen following him. Passing around the interior, he gave each cylinder a smart spank with the flat of his hand, causing it to revolve rapidly on its vertical spindle. In a moment all were in motion, and the whole house buzzing. The cylinders were reeling off prayers by machinery at a rapid rate; and the Lama, holding his simple rosary made of beans, stood ready to accelerate any particular cylinder which lagged behind.
There could be no doubt as to the exact intention, the sincerity and consequent efficacy of such prayers, simply because the proper wording for a prayer was printed upon a slip of paper carefully wrapped around the spindle inside the cylinder. Even if one’s thoughts did wander, the printed matter did not—the machine did the rest. All the worshipers had to do was to obey orders to attend service, and whirl the machine; the Lamas would take care of these wheels both inside and out, and would also give any stranger within their gates a little wheel for hand use, to take home with him, if he chose to pay for it.
Mrs. Cultus, who was still far from strong, no sooner entered the Temple than she found herself surrounded by buzzing wheels on three sides of the room; the fourth side occupied by what she called a “cabinet of curios.” So many rotary prayers, whirling simultaneously, were very confusing, especially as some of the wheels prayed in one direction and some others in just the opposite. Mrs. Cultus soon grasped the situation, however.
“I must have one. They are the most convenient things I ever saw. I did not know these Taoists had such Yankee notions in this line.”