‘The Lord!  The Lord!  It is Sakya Muni himself,’ the lama half sobbed; and under his breath began the wonderful Buddhist invocation: 

To Him the Way, the Law, apart, Whom Maya held beneath her heart, Ananda’s Lord, the Bodhisat.

’And He is here!  The Most Excellent Law is here also.  My pilgrimage is well begun.  And what work!  What work!’

‘Yonder is the Sahib.’ said Kim, and dodged sideways among the cases of the arts and manufacturers wing.  A white-bearded Englishman was looking at the lama, who gravely turned and saluted him and after some fumbling drew forth a note-book and a scrap of paper.

‘Yes, that is my name,’ smiling at the clumsy, childish print.

’One of us who had made pilgrimage to the Holy Places — he is now Abbot of the Lung-Cho Monastery — gave it me,’ stammered the lama.  ‘He spoke of these.’  His lean hand moved tremulously round.

’Welcome, then, O lama from Tibet.  Here be the images, and I am here’ — he glanced at the lama’s face — ’to gather knowledge.  Come to my office awhile.’  The old man was trembling with excitement.

The office was but a little wooden cubicle partitioned off from the sculpture-lined gallery.  Kim laid himself down, his ear against a crack in the heat-split cedar door, and, following his instinct, stretched out to listen and watch.

Most of the talk was altogether above his head.  The lama, haltingly at first, spoke to the Curator of his own lamassery, the Such-zen, opposite the Painted Rocks, four months’ march away.  The Curator brought out a huge book of photos and showed him that very place, perched on its crag, overlooking the gigantic valley of many-hued strata.

‘Ay, ay!’ The lama mounted a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles of Chinese work.  ’Here is the little door through which we bring wood before winter.  And thou — the English know of these things?  He who is now Abbot of Lung-Cho told me, but I did not believe.  The Lord — the Excellent One — He has honour here too?  And His life is known?’

’It is all carven upon the stones.  Come and see, if thou art rested.’

Out shuffled the lama to the main hall, and, the Curator beside him, went through the collection with the reverence of a devotee and the appreciative instinct of a craftsman.

Incident by incident in the beautiful story he identified on the blurred stone, puzzled here and there by the unfamiliar Greek convention, but delighted as a child at each new trove.  Where the sequence failed, as in the Annunciation, the Curator supplied it from his mound of books — French and German, with photographs and reproductions.