1853.] Notes upon a Tour in the Sikkim Himalayak Mountains. 631 



About twenty intelligent looking monks old and young, all dress- 

 ed in the garnet-coloured flowing robes with under clothes of richly 

 figured Chinese silks and satins, their hair cut short, assembled at 

 the sound of the gong ; they received us with great kindness and 

 provided us with seats at the entrance to the Goompa, where the 

 ceremony of chanting prayers for the dead was about to take place. 

 The walls of the vestibule in which we sat were highly ornamented 

 with painted figures as large as life, representing a Tibetan deity 

 on a white horse ; a female deity half-woman half-snake ; and another 

 deity upon some frightful beast. 



Looking through the capacious door or up the body of the tem- 

 ple, the sight reminded me of a Catholic Chapel during the perform- 

 ance of high mass. Three pillars highly ornamented, gilt and painted, 

 stand on either side of the aisle which terminates at the high altar, 

 or rather a deep recess filled with eight or ten strange images as 

 large as life. To the right of the recess there was a square metal 

 tray, containing a hundred lights which shone brightly in the dark- 

 ened room, the walls of which are painted from floor to ceiling with 

 the likenesses of gods and goddesses, with skulls and tridents, things 

 on earth, and with things that never were on earth, so beau- 

 tifully confused and confounded that to attempt to analyze or parti- 

 cularize what there was or what there was not, would be a matter of 

 difficulty. The colours were all of the brightest hues and pleasing 

 to the eye. 



On both sides of the aisle were ranged felt seats raised a foot 

 from the ground, upon these the twenty Lamas took their seats and 

 opened the ceremony by chanting a hymn, and finer bass voices I 

 never heard ; an old Lama sat near the altar on the right hand side 

 and immediately in front of him and standing in the centre of the 

 aisle was a figure dressed in the defunct Lamas clothes, a crash of 

 cymbals, and a loud blowing upon the human thigh-bone trumpets 

 closed each hymn, of which they chanted some twenty ; two boys 

 dressed as Lamas, during the whole of the service were very actively 

 engaged in serving out hot chee from Tibetan metal tea-pots to the 

 singers, who each held out his own wooden tea-cup produced from 

 the folds of their capacious robes, and when emptied and licked clean, 

 these were put back again into their breasts ; near the door and close 



