Their movements being impeded by the hair pins on their legs they offered an apparently easy PRIZE to the superstitious Islamites....  Abandoning their present enterprise against our party they dashed after the deceptive animals and disappeared over the hills in a mad scamper for GOOD LUCK....  This little ruse cleared our pathway and permitted us to reach Saspoula before the sun had set....  Here we passed a number of shrines besides the French and Thibetan convents....  Avoiding the convent with the tri-color floating from its mast we approached the other....  Here again were the dusty idols, banners and flags thrown into one corner, the floors littered with ugly masks and prayer wheels and books and rolls upon rolls of sacred papers mutely breathing their delegated prayers.

“...  As we had been informed, the lamas here were ready to receive us, with meal and beds prepared and our own apartments all in order....  The Lama who greeted us was about five feet tall, low flat forehead, flat nose, full thick lips, rather round small head and with a sweep of black whiskers falling from his chin....  In fact, NONE of these lamas are GRAY,—­the only thing that suggests AGE is their stooped and slender bodies and bent and bony fingers....  AND THEY ALLOW THE PRACTICE OF POLYANDRY in their diocese!...  One woman has a dozen husbands ... and every THIRD man we meet with is a lama.

“...  Still the women we see here are more attractive than those we encountered in Cashmere.

“...  Before leaving the convent we were again cautioned against holding conversation with STRANGERS we might encounter in the numerous caravans along the road to LEH....  We punctiliously obeyed these instructions during the rest of our journey until we reached the PETAK convent, which stands upon an isolated rock beside an abandoned garrison or fort, with its two towers looking like ant hills beside the majestic mountain that rises ten thousand feet above our resting place....  This mountain is the sentinel that protects our entrance into Thibet....  Six miles away is LEH, elevated eleven thousand feet above the lowlands and around whose shadowy convents rise those immense granite pinnacles to an elevation of eighteen thousand feet, where their frosty crests are enshrouded in the fezzes of eternal snows!...

“...  Leh, with its circlet of stubby aspen trees, its succession of terraces, its old fort and the palace of its forgotten Moguls, has its arms outstretched for us....  The mystic word has been passed along our route and BEHOLD we are encamped in a well-furnished three-story white bungalow with odors oozing from the kitchen that promise a night of security and content!...”

48.  The next entry gives a glimpse of the country through which our party passed: