the hot or cold hells of their religion.

In a gallery adorned with artistic wooden carvings and hung with
brocaded silk and gold embroideries sat a fat, bare-legged man with
close-cropped hair and scanty beard, wearing an ample, red silk gown
ornamented with Chinese designs worked in gold thread. He was the Penlop
of Tuna, the great feudal lord of the province, whose high-walled
_jong_, or castle, crowned the rocky hill on which the monastery and the
town were built. Behind him stood his officers and attendants clad in
silk or woollen kimono-like garments bound at the waist by gaily-worked
leather belts from which hung handsome swords with elaborately-wrought
silver hilts inlaid with coral and turquoises and with gold-washed
silver scabbards.

The courtyard was gay with fluttering prayer-flags, the poles of which
as well as the wooden pillars of the arcades were hung with the
beautiful banners artistically worked with countless pieces of coloured
silks and brocades and needlework pictures of Buddhist gods and saints
for which the monasteries of Bhutan are justly famed. From the blue sky
the sun blazed on the riot of mingled hues of the decorations and the
dresses of spectators and performers.

Especially gorgeous were the robes of the high priests in the spectacle.
They strongly resembled Catholic bishops in their gold-embroidered
mitres, copes and vestments as, carrying pastoral crooks or sprinkling
holy water, they moved around the courtyard in solemn procession behind
acolytes carrying sacred banners, swinging censers and intoning
harmonious chants. Troops of baffled demons fled at their approach
howling in diabolic despair. Shuddering wretches clad in scanty rags,
groping blindly as in the dark, wailing miserably and uttering weird,
long-drawn whistling notes, shrank aside from the fleeing devils and
stretched out their hands in supplication to the saintly prelates. They
were intended to represent the spirits of dead men straying in the
period of _Bardo_--the forty-nine days after death--during which the
soul released from the body is doomed to wander in search of its next
incarnation. In its journeyings it is assailed and terrified by demons,
who can only be defeated by the prayers of pious lamas to Chenresi the
Great Pitier.

The whole purpose of these representations is to familiarise during life
the devout Buddhists with the awful aspect of the many demons that will
obstruct their souls after death and try