Heller joined us
at Bui-tao with Mr. Kellogg. Caldwell thought it advisable to shift camp to
the Ling-suik monastery, about twelve miles away, where he had once spent a
summer with his family and had killed several tigers. This was within the
blue tiger's range and, moreover, had the advantage of offering a better
general collecting ground than Bui-tao; thus with Heller to look after the
small mammals we could begin to make our time count for something if we did
not get the tiger.

Ling-suik is a beautiful temple, or rather series of temples, built into a
hillside at the end of a long narrow valley which swells out like a great
bowl between bamboo clothed mountains, two thousand feet in height. On his
former visit Mr. Caldwell had made friends with the head priest and we were
allowed to establish ourselves upon the broad porch of the third and
highest building. It was an ideal place for a collecting camp and would
have been delightful except for the terrible heat which was rendered doubly
disagreeable by the almost continual rain.

The priests who shuffled about the temples were a hard lot. Most of them
were fugitives from justice and certainly looked the part, for a more
disreputable, diseased and generally undesirable body of men I have never
seen.

Our stay at Ling-suik was productive and the temple life interesting. We
slept on the porch and each morning, about half an hour before daylight,
the measured strokes of a great gong sounded from the temple just below us.
_Boom--boom--boom--boom_ it went, then rapidly _bang, bang, bang_. It was a
religious alarm clock to rouse the world.

A little later when the upturned gables and twisted dolphins on the roof
had begun to take definite shape in the gray light of the new day, the gong
boomed out again, doors creaked, and from their cell-like rooms shuffled
the priests to yawn and stretch themselves before the early service. The
droning chorus of hoarse voices, swelling in a meaningless half-wild chant,
harmonized strangely with the romantic surroundings of the temple and
become our daily _matin_ and evensong.

At the first gong we slipped from beneath our mosquito nets and dressed to
be ready for the bats which fluttered into the building to hide themselves
beneath the tiles and rafters. When daylight had fully come we scattered to
the four winds of heaven to inspect traps, hunt barking deer, or collect
birds, but gathered again at nine o'clock for breakfast and to dep