“’Woe and joy are awaiting me.  I shall become blind but Mongolia will be free.’

“The prophecy is fulfilled.  At another time, on a day when the Living Buddha was very much excited, he ordered a basin of water brought and set before the altar.  He called the Lamas and began to pray.  Suddenly the altar candles and lamps lighted themselves and the water in the basin became iridescent.”

Afterwards the Prince described to me how the Bogdo Khan tells fortunes with fresh blood, upon whose surface appear words and pictures; with the entrails of sheep and goats, according to whose distribution the Bogdo reads the fate of the Princes and knows their thoughts; with stones and bones from which the Living Buddha with great accuracy reads the lot of all men; and by the stars, in accordance with whose positions the Bogdo prepares amulets against bullets and disease.

“The former Bogdo Khans told fortunes only by the use of the ’black stone,’” said the Maramba.  “On the surface of the stone appeared Tibetan inscriptions which the Bogdo read and thus learned the lot of whole nations.”

When the Maramba spoke of the black stone with the Tibetan legends appearing on it, I at once recalled that it was possible.  In southeastern Urianhai, in Ulan Taiga, I came across a place where black slate was decomposing.  All the pieces of this slate were covered with a special white lichen, which formed very complicated designs, reminding me of a Venetian lace pattern or whole pages of mysterious runes.  When the slate was wet, these designs disappeared; and then, as they were dried, the patterns came out again.

Nobody has the right or dares to ask the Living Buddha to tell his fortune.  He predicts only when he feels the inspiration or when a special delegate comes to him bearing a request for it from the Dalai Lama or the Tashi Lama.  When the Russian Czar, Alexander I, fell under the influence of Baroness Kzudener and of her extreme mysticism, he despatched a special envoy to the Living Buddha to ask about his destiny.  The then Bogdo Khan, quite a young man, told his fortune according to the “black stone” and predicted that the White Czar would finish his life in very painful wanderings unknown to all and everywhere pursued.  In Russia today there exists a popular belief that Alexander I spent the last days of his life as a wanderer throughout Russia and Siberia under the pseudonym of Feodor Kusmitch, helping and consoling prisoners, beggars and other suffering people, often pursued and imprisoned by the police and finally dying at Tomsk in Siberia, where even until now they have preserved the house where he spent his last days and have kept his grave sacred, a place of pilgrimages and miracles.  The former dynasty of Romanoff was deeply interested in the biography of Feodor Kusmitch and this interest fixed the opinion that Kusmitch was really the Czar Alexander I, who had voluntarily taken upon himself this severe penance.