522 ROUTE FROM CATHMANDU, IN NEPAL, 



extracted from barley, are the food of all classes. The Rulers of Sakya are 

 two Lamas, whose lineage is traced to the same source with that of the 

 present imperial family of China. These Lamas are esteemed divine — 

 a character which they support by total seclusion from the world, and 

 the practise of the severest self-denial and constant mental abstraction. 

 Day and night, winter and summer, their clothes consist of merely a pair 

 of black trowsers, and a narrow band of red cloth circling diagonally 

 round the body, and passing over the right shoulder and under the left 

 arm. These Lamas never sleep with their limbs extended at ease, like 

 ordinary mortals, but in the same erect cross-legged attitude which they 

 maintain throughout the day. The better to enable them to keep the 

 erect attitude at the times when they are involuntarily overcome by sleep, 

 they pass the diagonal body-band under their feet at night. The names 

 of these Lamas are Sakya Gumba Ramborchi and Kunda Kusho, and 

 they are brothers. Their conventual residence is of vast size — and in one 

 of the apartments are placed two leather bags filled with sand, and having 

 a couple of eyes painted on the outside of each of them. The name of 

 the bags is Upke, and it is said, whenever any of the followers of these 

 Lamas is about to die, some one of the lesser Lamas, attendant on the 

 great Lamas, takes one of these bags to the abode of the dying 

 man, and, emptying it of the sand, places the mouth of it over the 

 mouth of the man, so as to receive his last breath — which being thus 

 secured in the bag, is carried away to a mansion called Ukdn, or " the 

 house of breath," for such is the meaning of the word. Ukdn is an 

 immense structure, whence issues at night a horrible din of ghosts and 

 demons, so that no man hath courage enough to approach it. Once a 

 year, a Sirdar from Lahassa, comes to Sakya — when the Lama called Sdkya 

 Gdmba Ramborchi, shews the interior of Ukdn to the Sirdar, when the 

 number of the dead deposited therein, during the past twelve months, is 

 seen written, by the hands of angels, on the walls : the Lama Ramborchi 

 copies this inscription, and sends the copy to Lahassa, by the Sirdar — within 



