A few steps to the south-west we passed over a sheet of schist with two stone huts at its foot containing brushwood and twigs for burning. In Samde-pu-pe were two small temples with altars of mud. In one of them were idols of medium size and sea shells, and before them incense smouldered, not in the usual form of sticks, but in powder. It was strewn in a zigzag line, was lighted at one end, and allowed to smoulder away to the other. Within was a statue of Lovun with two lights before it, and a shelf with writings called Chöna. Rain water had percolated in and formed white vertical channels in the plaster, and under the ceiling kadakhs and draperies fluttered in the draught. Here the mice were less disturbed than in the ghostly castle Pesu.
Close at hand at the foot of the mountain is the hermitage, dupkang, in which a hermit spends his days and years. It is built over a spring which bubbles up in the centre of the single room, a square apartment with each side five paces long. The walls are very thick, and are in one solid mass, unbroken by windows. The doorway is very low, and the wooden door is shut and locked; but that is not enough, so a wall of large blocks and smaller stones has been built before the door, and even the smallest interstices between them have been carefully filled up with pebbles. Not an inch of the door can be seen. But beside the entrance is a tiny tunnel through which the hermit’s food can be pushed in. The amount of daylight which can penetrate through the long narrow loophole must be very small; and it does not shine in direct, for the front of the hut is shut in by a wall, forming a small court, which only the monk who brings the anchorite his daily ration may enter. A small chimney rises from the flat roof, for the hermit may make himself tea every sixth day, and for this purpose some sticks of firewood are pushed through the loophole twice in the month. Through the chimney, too, a feeble light may fall, and by means of these two vents the air is renewed in the cell.
“What is the name of the lama who is now walled up in this cell?” I asked.
“He has no name, and even if we knew it we durst not utter it. We call him merely the Lama Rinpoche” (according to Köppen, lama means quo nemo est superior, one who has no one over him; and Rinpoche means gem, jewel, holiness).
“Where has he come from?”
“He was born in Ngor in Naktsang.”
“Has he relations?”
“That we do not know; and if he has any, they do not know that he is here.”
“How long has he lived in the darkness?”
“It is now three years since he went in.”