TIBET. 
227 
steep rock: it consisted of about one hundred and fifty houses, which 
rose in rows, one behind the other. They were square, pretty regular 
in their form, and the whitened walls had a band about their tops, two 
or three feet broad, of a deep garnet colour, which, with the addition of 
temples, gilded ornaments, and the decorated dwellings of their supe¬ 
rior priests, made a very handsome and brilliant spectacle. The whole 
building was surrounded by high walls, which were continued along 
the ridge of the rock, and crossed by many intermediate gateways or 
lodgments, so as to command the monastery, which fronted towards the 
castle, as well as to overlook the other side of the rock, which was 
extremely rugged, and almost perpendicular. 
In this neighbourhood we were pestered by a multitude of beggars, 
of all ages, and of both sexes: among them were some boys, who put 
on masks, and played a variety of antic tricks; and we came suddenly 
upon two old women in rags, at the corner of a street, strumming the 
cittaur, a rude kind of stringed instrument, and capering clumsily to 
their own miserable music. 
The profession of the mendicant tribe is not unknown, as I per¬ 
ceived, in Tibet, but it is conducted with a better policy than in 
Europe; as they practise, and perhaps with more success, tricks of 
merriment, never shocking human nature with the cant of fictitious 
* 
misery, or with assumed deformity. A few bits of silver, which I threw 
upon the ground, presently employed them all in a scramble, and gave 
me time to make my escape. 
About a mile farther, crossing the river, we kept by the course 
of it, through the valley of Jhansu, which was extremely rich with 
G g 
