Especially gorgeous were the robes of the high priests in the spectacle.  They strongly resembled Catholic bishops in their gold-embroidered mitres, copes and vestments as, carrying pastoral crooks or sprinkling holy water, they moved around the courtyard in solemn procession behind acolytes carrying sacred banners, swinging censers and intoning harmonious chants.  Troops of baffled demons fled at their approach howling in diabolic despair.  Shuddering wretches clad in scanty rags, groping blindly as in the dark, wailing miserably and uttering weird, long-drawn whistling notes, shrank aside from the fleeing devils and stretched out their hands in supplication to the saintly prelates.  They were intended to represent the spirits of dead men straying in the period of Bardo—­the forty-nine days after death—­during which the soul released from the body is doomed to wander in search of its next incarnation.  In its journeyings it is assailed and terrified by demons, who can only be defeated by the prayers of pious lamas to Chenresi the Great Pitier.

The whole purpose of these representations is to familiarise during life the devout Buddhists with the awful aspect of the many demons that will obstruct their souls after death and try to lead them astray when they are searching for the right path to the next world in which they are to begin a fresh existence.

On this strange, bewildering spectacle an English girl looked down from a small balcony not twenty feet above the courtyard.  And the sight of her caused the attention of many of the spectators to wander from the Mystery Play.  The fat old Penlop frequently looked across the quadrangle at her from his gallery and as often uttered some coarse jest about her to his grinning followers, while he raised a chased silver goblet filled with murwa, the native liquor, to his lips.

It was Muriel Benson.  For weeks she had been a prisoner in the lamasery, cloistered in a suite of well-furnished rooms and waited on by a close-cropped nun.  She had been surprised in the bungalow and overpowered by three of the Chinamen before she realised her danger or could seize a weapon with which to defend herself.  Had she been able to snatch up a revolver she would have made a desperate fight for freedom.  But with fettered hands, a helpless captive, she had been carried away on a mule.  From the first she had recognised the pock-marked, one-eyed leader of the gang as the Amban’s officer, and so had known who was the author and cause of her abduction.  For days she had been borne along up the rough track over the mountains, through narrow, high-walled passes, down deep valleys and across rushing torrents, closely guarded but always treated with respect.  Her captors used broken Tibetan and Bhutanese when they desired to communicate with her, but they answered none of her questions.  She had dreaded reaching their destination, where she expected to find Yuan Shi Hung awaiting her; and once, in fear of it, she had tried to throw herself down a precipice along the brink of which the path ran.  After that she had been roped to a big, powerful Manchu.