THE TEMPLE OE KUM-BUM 1195 
After seeing that Buddhist “ kitchen,” we went out into 
a courtyard, with cloisters all round it, and its walls 
painted with a whole series of pictures of the gods. Their 
wrinkled brows, broad noses, widely expanded nostrils, 
distorted mouths, screwed up moustaches, and black eye- 
brows put me in mind of evil spirits rather than gods. 
But these features were intended to depict the awful and 
destructive power of the gods. 
The Buddhist architecture leaves a peculiar “mythical” 
impression upon the mind. It conforms to the rules of 
Tibetan taste ; but in the end it becomes wearisome to a 
European, who is accustomed to the sound and genuine 
forms of the West. In such interiors you cannot possibly 
experience that sense of calm serenity and well-being which 
you feel in a Christian temple. Your eye wanders from one 
upturned gable, from one florid capital, to another. 
Whichever way you turn, your glance encounters the 
same confusion of sculptural forms, the same harsh 
agglomerations of colour — blue, and green, and violet, all 
flourishing in peace and amity together. Less than that 
would be enough to strike you with colour-blindness. 
Even the legitimate effects of the sometimes imposing 
interiors of the temples filled me with repulsion, a feeling 
I never experienced in any Mohammedan mosque I ever 
was in. 
What perhaps contributed to awaken this feeling in 
me in such an intense degree were the swarms of idle 
lamas, who did nothing all day long but grovel on their 
hands and knees, muttering their stupid parrot - like 
repetitions before those gilded blocks of wood or clay, 
which they or their fathers fabricated with their own 
hands. They sat about the cloisters, and yawned, and 
told their beads. Whenever I stopped to make a sketch 
or a drawing, they started like rats out of their holes 
and lurking-places, and swarmed thickly round me, 
infesting the very air with the ill-savour of their presence. 
The majority of them were boys between ten and fifteen, 
who had been sent to the monastery to be trained and 
brought up as full-fledged lamas. In one place a band 
