d I discern any footprints. Was the place but a ruin? We
had found many such; indeed this ancient land is full of buildings that
had once served as the homes of men, learned and pious enough after
their own fashion, who lived and died hundreds, or even thousands, of
years ago, long before our Western civilization came into being.

My heart, also my stomach, which was starving, sank at the thought,
but while I gazed doubtfully, a little coil of blue smoke sprang from
a chimney, and never, I think, did I see a more joyful sight. In the
centre of the edifice was a large building, evidently the temple, but
nearer to us I saw a small door, almost above which the smoke appeared.
To this door I went and knocked, calling aloud--"Open! open, holy
Lamas. Strangers seek your charity." After awhile there was a sound of
shuffling feet and the door creaked upon its hinges, revealing an old,
old man, clad in tattered, yellow garments.

"Who is it? Who is it?" he exclaimed, blinking at me through a pair of
horn spectacles. "Who comes to disturb our solitude, the solitude of the
holy Lamas of the Mountains?"

"Travellers, Sacred One, who have had enough of solitude," I answered in
his own dialect, with which I was well acquainted. "Travellers who are
starving and who ask your charity, which," I added, "by the Rule you
cannot refuse."

He stared at us through his horn spectacles, and, able to make nothing
of our faces, let his glance fall to our garments which were as ragged
as his own, and of much the same pattern. Indeed, they were those of
Thibetan monks, including a kind of quilted petticoat and an outer
vestment not unlike an Eastern burnous. We had adopted them because we
had no others. Also they protected us from the rigours of the climate
and from remark, had there been any to remark upon them.

"Are you Lamas?" he asked doubtfully, "and if so, of what monastery?"

"Lamas sure enough," I answered, "who belong to a monastery called the
World, where, alas! one grows hungry."

The reply seemed to please him, for he chuckled a little, then shook his
head, saying--"It is against our custom to admit strangers unless they
be of our own faith, which I am sure you are not."

"And much more is it against your Rule, holy Khubilghan," for so these
abbots are entitled, "to suffer strangers to starve"; and I quoted a
well-known passage from the sayings of Buddha which fitted the point
precisely.

"I perceive that you are instructed i