Some devotees hang therefrom bones and
strips of cloth, with inscriptions. Other pious
souls deposit money in an urn set for the
purpose. Very soon after, comes some other
pious soul—Chinese, however—who bends and
kneels, and is very busy about the urn, after
which it is found empty by the next wayfarer.
After descending from the plateau, the
travellers journeyed through a region desolated by
the possession of gold and silver mines. The
Chinese are very apt at gold discovery. The
form of a hill tells them whether or not to
look for gold. A hill was found here, consisting
mainly of rich ore, Tradition asserts
that at the news, twelve thousand outcasts
and bandits assembled; and besides reducing
the value of gold in China one half, they laid waste
the whole country by their violence.
Having robbed a Queen, on pilgrimage, of her
jewels, she made such bitter complaints, that
the Tartar soldiery were called out. They
found the miners a formidable foe, but they
drove them in at last. The survivors were
blocked up in their mine, where they had
taken refuge; and there the starving wretches
howled and screamed for some days, before
their misery ceased in death. What a spectacle
that gold mine must be—with the skeletons
peopling its rich recesses! The few miners
who escaped death by the sword and hunger,
had their eyes put out, and were driven forth
to take their chance. This story may seem
to some people to show that the discovery of
a gold field is not always a very happy
thing. In the present case, it is not easy to
see who was the better for it.

On the missionaries went, now and then
entering a town, but, for the most part,
encamping in the wildest places imaginable. To
enter a town was no easy matter, the streets
being such a mass of putrid mud that the soft
feet of the camel can take no hold, and there
is every danger of its falling on its side; in
which case suffocation is almost inevitable.
As for smaller beasts of burden, they may be
expected to sink and be swallowed up; in
which case the carcase remains, to aggravate
the perpetual stench; and the baggage does
not remain, if dexterous Chinamen are at
hand to help themselves to it. In towns
admitting of commerce, the articles are
horses, oxen, and camels on the one hand,
and brick-tea, tobacco, linen, and some
common fabrics on the other. If any Chinese
who happened to be in town heard of the
arrival of the Lamas of the West, as the
priests were called, they came about the
strangers, uttering the most charming
sentiments about men being all brothers, and so
forth, the consequence of which was usually
some outrageous cheating, or other treachery.
The travellers much preferred seeing a rough
Tartar ride up to their tent in the wilds, to
ask them to cure his child or his mother, or
to draw his horoscope, that he might know
who had carried off his horses; or, possibly,
to bring a prodigiously fat sheep for sale; or
to beg some meal to knead into his tea.
Throughout the narrative the priests speak
with affection of the kindly simplicity of the
roving races, and with indulgence of their
wild passions, which, it must be owned,
are less disagreeable to hear of than the
mean faults attributed to the Chinese. It
must also be owned, however, that the
Chinese can hardly do anything worse
than some Tartar acts that we hear of
—for instance, the ceremonial of a funeral
in the case of a chief. The expensive edifice,
adorned with figures of the Buddhist mythology,
and stored with treasure, all ready
for the next life, may be no matter of
quarrel; but when we read how the great
man is to be attended, we certainly think the
plan as bad as any ever made in China. The
most beautiful young people that can be
found, youths and maidens, are made to
swallow mercury till they are suffocated—
the idea being that people who die in that
way look fresher than any other corpses; and
the defunct company are then placed in
attitudes round the bier all standing, and one
holding the snuff-phial, another the pipe, and
another the fan. In their zeal to guard the
dead, the Tartars, for once, are found to excel
the Chinese in ingenuity. They have invented
a bow, which may be called a cluster of bows,
so formidable as a defence of treasure, that
Chinamen come and buy it. A series of bows
have their arrows on the string, ready to fly.
The opening of the door of the tomb or
cavern discharges the first arrow, which
causes the discharge of the second, and so
on, till the intruder becomes a very pincushion.
It is only the greatest men that may be buried
in this way. The next richest are burned in
furnaces, and their bones, powdered, are
worked up with meal into cakes, which are
piled into a heap in the tomb. It is to be
inferred that it is only the very greatest
men who may take snuff and smoke in the
next life. The poorest are carried up to
the tops of mountains, or cast down into
ravines, with wolves and carrion birds for
their undertakers. The very best burial in the
whole world, we are told, is in the Lamasery
(Buddhist temple) of the Five Towers.
Any one buried there is sure of a happy
transmigration; The reason of the sanctity of
the Five Towers is that Buddha himself has
chosen to reside, for the last few centuries, in
the interior of a mountain close by. A man
who carried thither the bones of his father
and mother, in 1842, told the missionaries
that he had himself seen Buddha there. He
peeped through a very small spy-hole near
the top of the mountain, but, for a time,
could see nothing. At length he became
able to discern, in the dim shadow, the face
of Buddha, who was sitting cross-legged,
doing nothing, but receiving the worship of
his priests from all countries.

On they went,—these good men—meeting
with strange disasters, which, however, they