ABSTRACT
Gyantse is celebrated for its devil-dances, in which the central figure is the black-hatted priest, a survival of the pre-Buddhist Bon religion. One of the rooms was the Devils' Chamber of Horrors, a sort of Satanic Aladdin's cave in the dark, designed to awe and impress the superstitious pilgrims. On a hill-top below the above hermitage was the local Golgotha, the place where the dead bodies are thrown to be devoured by dogs, vultures, crows and other carrion feeders. The still larger monastery of Tse-chen, covered the side of a hill 5 miles across the valley. From every hamlet the cottagers had swarmed out into their fields and were busily ploughing and sowing in the glorious sunshine, forming pleasing bits of bright colour. The average Tibetan, and especially the priest or "Lama," is extraordinarily low in intelligence, and almost incapable of conceiving any new abstract idea or the rationale for a particular practice, if it demands much mental effort.
