acked the shadow, as it were, of this impersonality, and
found that to many strangers in Lhasa, and perhaps to a few Lhasans
themselves, the divinity was all clay, a palpable fraud, a pompous and
puritanical dullard masquerading as a god.

For my own part, I think the oracle that counselled his flight wiser
than the statesmen who object that it was a political mistake. He has
lost his prestige, they say. But imagine him dragged into durbar as a
signatory, gazed at by profane eyes, the subject of a few days' gossip
and comment, then sunk into commonplace, stripped of his mystery like
this city of Lhasa, through which we now saunter familiarly, wondering
when we shall start again for the _wilds_.

To escape this ordeal he has fled, and to us, at least, his flight has
deepened the mystery that envelops him, and added to his dignity and
remoteness; to thousands of mystical dreamers it has preserved the
effulgence of his godhead unsoiled by contact with the profane world.

From our camp here the Potala draws the eye like a magnet. There is
nothing but sky and marsh and bleak hill and palace. When we look out of
our tents in the morning, the sun is striking the golden roof like a
beacon light to the faithful. Nearly every day in August this year has
opened fine and closed with storm-clouds gathering from the west,
through which the sun shines, bathing the eastern valley in a soft,
pearly light. The western horizon is dark and lowering, the eastern
peaceful and serene. In this division of darkness and light the Potala
stands out like a haven, not flaming now, but faintly luminous with a
restful mystic light, soothing enough to rob Buddhist metaphysics of its
pessimism and induce a mood, even in unbelievers, in which one is
content to merge the individual and become absorbed in the universal
spirit of Nature.

No wonder that, when one looks for mystery in Lhasa, one's thoughts
dwell solely on the Dalai Lama and the Potala. I cannot help dwelling on
the flight of the thirteenth incarnation. It plunges us into
medievalism. To my mind, there is no picture so romantic and engrossing
in modern history as that exodus, when the spiritual head of the
Buddhist Church, the temporal ruler of six millions, stole out of his
palace by night and was borne away in his palanquin, no one knows on
what errand or with what impotent rage in his heart. The flight was
really secret. No one but his immediate confidants and retainers, not
even the