FROM TONKIN TO INDIA 



on the shoulders of the people ; and withdraws afterwards into 

 the mountains for twenty-five days, whither the tribe brings 

 him food. They burn their dead ; but the ceremony never 

 takes place during harvest. At that season the bodies must 

 wait, sometimes preserved in salt. 



Mosso writing has no real existence as such. The wizards 

 make and keep manuscript books filled with hieroglyphics ; each 

 page is divided into little partitions, horizontally from left to 

 right, in which are inserted rough drawings of men, houses, 

 animals' heads, and conventional signs for the sky, lightning, 

 etc. I was enabled to carry awav with me several of these 

 books. The traveller Gill and the Abbe Desgodins had already 

 taken specimens to Europe, but without a clue to their meaning. 

 The magicians explained two of them to me. They were 

 prayers beginning with the mention of the creation of the world, 

 and ending by an enumeration of all the ills which menace 

 man, which he can avoid if he is pious and gives gifts to the 

 magicians. I have been able by collation to establish the 

 identity of certain ideas with certain signs, although the 

 wizards told me they had no alphabet, and that the hieroglyphs 

 were handed on by oral tradition alone. It was interesting to 

 light among an isolated people upon one of the first stages in 

 the evolution of writing. Many of the Chinese characters 

 were originally simply pictorial hieroglyphs ; and had the Mossos 

 developed instead of restricted their signs, we might perchance 

 have seen in their sacred books the birth of letters for them also. 



Yetchd, as I have said, is the residence of a viokoua. He 

 is of noble blood, and belongs to the ancient royal family of 

 Li-kiang. The power with which he is invested by the Chinese 

 Government is hereditary. His territory, which extends but a 



21 2 



