same as that of the Astyn Tagh, followed by Mr. Littledale in 1893, who travelled one month from Abdal (Lob-nor) to Shachau; M. Bonin, who explored also this route, and was twenty-three days from Shachau to Lob-nor, says it could not be a commercial road.  Dr. Sven Hedin saw four or five towers eastward of the junction of the Tarim and the Koncheh-daria; it may possibly have been another part of the road seen by M. Bonin. (See La Geographie, 15th March, 1901, p. 173.)—­H.  C.]

CHAPTER XL.

CONCERNING THE GREAT PROVINCE OF TANGUT.

After you have travelled thirty days through the Desert, as I have described, you come to a city called SACHIU, lying between north-east and east; it belongs to the Great Kaan, and is in a province called TANGUT.[NOTE 1] The people are for the most part Idolaters, but there are also some Nestorian Christians and some Saracens.  The Idolaters have a peculiar language, and are no traders, but live by their agriculture.[NOTE 2] They have a great many abbeys and minsters full of idols of sundry fashions, to which they pay great honour and reverence, worshipping them and sacrificing to them with much ado.  For example, such as have children will feed up a sheep in honour of the idol, and at the New Year, or on the day of the Idol’s Feast, they will take their children and the sheep along with them into the presence of the idol with great ceremony.  Then they will have the sheep slaughtered and cooked, and again present it before the idol with like reverence, and leave it there before him, whilst they are reciting the offices of their worship and their prayers for the idol’s blessing on their children.  And, if you will believe them, the idol feeds on the meat that is set before it!  After these ceremonies they take up the flesh and carry it home, and call together all their kindred to eat it with them in great festivity [the idol-priests receiving for their portion the head, feet, entrails, and skin, with some part of the meat].  After they have eaten, they collect the bones that are left and store them carefully in a hutch.[NOTE 3]

And you must know that all the Idolaters in the world burn their dead.  And when they are going to carry a body to the burning, the kinsfolk build a wooden house on the way to the spot, and drape it with cloths of silk and gold.  When the body is going past this building they call a halt and set before it wine and meat and other eatables; and this they do with the assurance that the defunct will be received with the like attentions in the other world.  All the minstrelsy in the town goes playing before the body; and when it reaches the burning-place the kinsfolk are prepared with figures cut out of parchment and paper in the shape of men and horses and camels, and also with round pieces of paper like gold coins, and all these they burn along with the corpse.  For they say that in the other world the defunct will be provided with slaves and cattle and money, just in proportion to the amount of such pieces of paper that has been burnt along with him.[NOTE 4]