There were five flagstaffs hung with prayers on our inn, besides a long cord, hung with them, stretched across the roof. People were muttering "Om Mani Padmi Hum" as they passed along the street; and as the last sound at night was the Lamas' trumpets calling to prayers, so we were roused before dawn by the men in the room below us reciting continuously "Om Mani Padmi Hum" over and over again for two hours at least. One began to say it oneself: "The jewel is in the lotus,"—a pretty saying enough, which might mean anything. But, alas! we could see no more of the Tibetans at their devotions. At the first lamaserai we visited the temple doors were closed, and the Lamas signified by gestures that no key could be found to open them. They were not uncivil there, although rather peremptorily forbidding me to use my eyeglass till they had themselves examined it, to see what effect it might have on the brilliantly coloured pictures in the temple porch. They also forbade me to photograph, yet allowed me to do so in the end, and acquiesced in my going upstairs to get a better place for the camera. There I saw that the door of each Lama's room, giving on the colonnade running round the courtyard, was locked and padlocked with a padlock of such portentous size as to suggest many thoughts. Only one door downstairs had been open, where a very small Lama was repeating his lessons out of what looked like a most beautifully written and illuminated book; for, the paper in the window being torn out, we could see all over the room, which looked like a particularly dirty, dilapidated little stable. But when I asked the small boy's leave to go in, wishing to examine his book, he sprang to the doorway, and the attitude into which he threw himself, forbidding me to enter, was superb. It said "Avaunt, Satanas!" and indicated that all the lightnings of heaven would fall, if I took but one step forward. And, though amused, I could not but admire the little boy for so pluckily standing his ground. But when another little Lama, on our coolies somewhat roughly ordering him to keep clear of the camera, threw himself into an attitude of boxing, it seemed so ridiculous that, just to test him, I laughed, then clenched my fist, and made as if I would fight too; on which he laughed heartily, showing he could quite understand a joke.
Most of the buildings at Tachienlu appeared in the last stage of decay, especially the temples. One was so full of birds' droppings that we imagined they could never have been cleared away since the day it was built. Two fierce dogs were chained across the threshold; and though I found I could just squeeze myself in out of reach of either, I noticed none of our Chinese coolies cared to follow. Tibetan dogs are noted for their fierceness, and are one of the great difficulties of travel in Tibet. There were boys burning something that had a horrible smell in the great incense-burner in front, while a priest, attended by a boy, was beating a gong and chanting within. This was the only sign of worship we came across. But the passageway between the back and front temple was all hung with oblong bits of paper, on which prayers were written. One day we met two very wild-looking Tibetans, each bent under a load of three huge pieces of slate inscribed with prayers; and presently we met a string of Tibetan women, bent more than double under loads of five, six, or even as many as seven bars of brick tea, each weighing twenty pounds. The world often seems rather topsy-turvy to a traveller.
A dark door like a house door, a dark passage merely partitioned off from a shop, then an alley-way that seemed to be used as a slaughter-house, led up to Kwanyin's temple, a very conspicuous and rather coquettish building on a hill overlooking the town. When we got there, followed by a crowd of the usual tiresome little Chinese boys, and also by two most beautiful Tibetans, on pushing open the door we found numbers of neglected prayers hanging from the rafters, old broken beams lying in a heap, a staircase so rickety that no one liked to go up it, and, at the top of it, a barred door, sufficiently saying "Not at home." One of the Tibetans had such a quantity of hair, and such ringlets, that one of our coolies, with Chinese insolence, touched it to see if it was real. The Tibetan was elderly, and evidently well seasoned to the world, and only laughed at the liberty. But his companion—a beautiful youth, with a face of that feminine type that one only sees now in old books of beauty, arched eyebrows delicately pencilled, aquiline nose, features all too delicate for this workaday world—blushed vividly, and looked so unutterably pained that I longed to apologise, only we lacked a mutual language. He had himself a yet more inordinate quantity of hair, some of which must have been horse-hair, frizzed and raised so as to simulate the high pompadour style; but I think the ringlets that shadowed his translucent complexion must have been his own.
Then we went on to the great lamaserai, some distance from the town upon the Lassa road. We walked between walls of prayer-slates on either hand, with prayers streaming to the wind on all the hilltops and on every point of vantage; and having crossed the Chinese parade-ground, with a very beautiful weeping-willow and an avenue of specially fine alders of a local variety, saw a temple all golden points and golden balls outside, and attached to it a long melancholy building rather like a workhouse, but for tall, narrow baskets in all the windows ablaze with Tibetan Glory—a brilliant orange marigold. Several little boy Lamas sat on the doorstep playing with a dead rat, which they were pulling about by a string, one little crimson-clad boy screaming with delight at the dead creature's antics. We had just been warned to take up our little dog because of the fierce dogs inside, and the little Lamas now laughed and cried out at the sight of a dog being carried.
There were many coloured cylinders on each side of the entrance gate—prayer-wheels—and it was curious to notice the expression of one of these children, when, thinking I was imitating him, I turned one of the cylinders the wrong way. He shrieked, and the expression of concentrated rage in his knotted eyebrows was a revelation to me. I hastened to turn the cylinder the right way with a smile, and the little fellow was pacified, while all the children set off running—as it appeared afterwards—to announce our coming, and have their own fierce dogs shut up.
We found ourselves in a very large courtyard—a long parallelogram—handsomely, indeed gorgeously, painted. Opposite to the entrance gate were the closed doors of the temple, with no way of opening them visible, brilliantly coloured pictures on either side of them. The summits of the temple were so heavily gilded as to look like solid gold, so also were two deer about the size of collie dogs, sitting one on each side of a large golden disc, curiously worked, placed on the temple front above the door. On the top of the temple were several of those curious Tibetan ornaments of which I neither know the name nor the purpose. Two looked like very tall, narrow, golden flower-pots, handsomely ornamented; two like sticks with ropes hanging down all round them, girt transversely with white paper bands. Could they possibly be meant for state umbrellas? The cords were black, and looked as if made of hair. The front of the temple was of stone, painted red, but the top of it looked as if it consisted of billets of wood all laid close together, of a dull red-brown. There was a brilliantly painted colonnade, with outside staircase leading at intervals to an upper verandah, all round the courtyard, excepting just where stood the temple; and to its left a specially gaudy house. In front of this latter was again a collection of black hanging ropes, and on the top of this a human skull!
While I was noticing all these details, Lamas all in crimson, each with the right arm bare, continued to troop into the courtyard and into the verandah above, from which at first they looked down, making eyes and smiling the Lama's smile upon a woman. But suddenly, as a loud voice, with the tone of authority, became audible in the distance, the smiles vanished, and the Lamas stood round quite expressionless with folded arms. I had just stepped forward to examine more carefully that human skull, startled by the horror of it amidst all the gorgeous colouring around, when the blood rushed to my heart, as there came a sound, and close upon the sound two large Tibetan dogs sprang out through an inner gateway and made straight for me.
It passed through my mind at once, that it was useless to try to quell Tibetan dogs, as one so often quells Chinese dogs. I remembered that they are said never to let go, and I knew now at once that voice in authority had been ordering the dogs to be loosed. Sick with terror, I yet thrust the iron point of my alpenstock into the jaws of the foremost dog; but the fierce creature, although with such tremendous leverage against it, tore it from my grasp, and shook the long stick in its teeth as if it had been a straw. My husband sprang forward to the rescue, though still holding our own little dog in his arms. One of our coolies, a really brave, strong ex-soldier, followed him, and together the two managed somehow to beat off the dogs, and then we all ran for it. My recollection is that to the last not a Lama—and there must have been at least forty of them standing round, all draped in crimson—moved a muscle even of his countenance. We had bowed politely on entering, and asked leave; but we did not bow as we came away thus hurriedly to the sound of more and more dogs baying in the distance.
There were shrines full of little clay pyramids covered with images of Buddha; there were more and finer prayer-slates by the principal entrance, by which we came out. But whether the Lamas ever pray, God knows, I don't!
As we passed back into the town again, from the shop from which a handsome woman, beautifully bejewelled, had gone out that morning with her handmaid to do her own washing in the pure glacier stream, we heard a jolly laugh ring out from the same jovial Lama we had left there talking to my handsome friend as we passed out.