In every house and monastery we entered on the road there were gilded
images, tawdry paintings, demons and she-devils, garish frescoes on the
wall, hideous grinning devil-masks, all the Lama's spurious apparatus of
terrorism.

These were the outward symbols of demonolatry and superstition invented
by scheming priests as the fabric of their sacerdotalism. But this was
the resting-place of the Reformer, the true son of Buddha, who came
over the Himalayas to preach a religion of love and mercy.

I entered the building out of the glare of the sun, expecting nothing
but the usual monsters and abortions--just as one is dragged into a
church in some tourist-ridden land, where, if only for the sake of
peace, one must cast an apathetic eye at the lions of the country. But
as the tomb gradually assumed shape in the dim light, I knew that there
was someone here, a priest or a community, who understood Atisa, who
knew what he would have wished his last resting-place to be; or perhaps
the good old monk had left a will or spoken a plain word that had been
handed down and remembered these thousand years, and was now, no doubt,
regarded as an eccentric's whim, that there must be no gods or demons by
his tomb, nothing abnormal, no pretentiousness of any kind. If his
teaching had lived, how simple and honest and different Tibet would be
to-day!

The tomb was not beautiful--a large square plinth, supporting layers of
gradually decreasing circumference and forming steps two feet in height,
the last a platform on which was based a substantial vat-like structure
with no ornament or inscription except a thin line of black pencilled
saints. By climbing up the layers of masonry I found a pair of slant
eyes gazing at nothing and hidden by a curve in the stone from gazers
below. This was the only painting on the tomb.

Never in the thousand years since the good monk was laid to rest at
Nethang had a white man entered this shrine. To-day the courtyard was
crowded with mules and drivers; Hindus and Pathans in British uniform:
they were ransacking the place for corn. A transport officer was
shouting:

'How many bags have you, babu?'

'A hundred and seven, sir.'

'Remember, if anyone loots, he will get fifty _beynt_' (stripes with the
cat-o'-nine-tails).

Then he turned to me.

'What the devil is that old thief doing over there?' he said, and nodded
at a man with archaeological interests, who was peering about in a dark
corner by the t