gain, in the most holy of spots, not only in Gyantse but even, for
instance, in the audience hall in the sacred 'Pota-La,' or
palace-monastery of Lhassa, one comes across images of what to European
eyes appears the lewdest character, and similar representations are
constantly found on the painted scrolls, which everywhere are seen
hanging in the monasteries.

Such strange excrescences on the external face of a religion that ranks
so high in regard to the spirituality of its essential tenets, and the
extent and depth of its influence on human life, as does Buddhism, seem
only to point to the endless intertwinings of religions that must ever
have been in process since the world began. Here we have, for instance,
one of the noblest and purest of religions tainted--at any rate as
regards the art which is ancillary to it--with those twin poisons of
demon-worship and priapism; all contact with which one would have
imagined it to have been pure enough and strong enough to throw off
centuries ago.

That strange similarity on less essential points that exists between
religions which are far removed from each other, both in history and in
doctrine, makes one long to read some really comprehensive history of
human religion that will, by dipping down into the furthest depths of
the past, reveal to us the answer to such problems as, for instance, the
strong and apparently family likeness between the joss-sticks and tallow
altar-lamp of the Buddhist, and the incense and wax-candle of ornate
Christian ritual.

Though it would appear that what is barbaric may survive, in the form
of ritual, as an acknowledged and in some cases, it may be, even a
helpful adjunct to a religion which in every other respect has cast off
all that is barbarous, yet some of those demons and those licentious
pictures that we saw in Tibet seemed to the Western mind altogether too
vile to be thus explained away.

But, even so, what fool shall rush in and criticise the East?

CHAPTER XI

THE START FOR LHASSA: A DIGRESSION ON SUPPLY AND TRANSPORT

Suddenly the order came that we were to march to Lhassa forthwith. Who
should and who should not form the Lhassa column must have been a
difficult question to settle. To perform invidious tasks of this sort
must be the most trying feature of generalship. It would be hard to find
an occasion on any expedition when, to the individual soldier, going on
seemed to mean so much, and staying behind so little. Fo