282 
TIBET. 
from intercourse with strangers, and shut out from the rest of the world 
by inaccessible mountains, by Imaus, on the one hand, and by the inhos¬ 
pitable deserts of Gobi, on the other, is not with reason to be expected; 
and still less is it to be sought for, in more northerly regions, where one 
half of the year is a season of profound darkness, and the wretched 
inhabitants are compelled to seek refuge from the severity of the sea¬ 
sons, in deep and gloomy caverns; where, possibly, the powers and 
faculties of the mind, are in some degree benumbed by the same pow¬ 
erful operation of intense cold, which arrests the progress of vegetable 
life; and where, certainly, the great mass of the people are doomed to 
labour perpetually, for the scanty and precarious support of mere 
animal existence. 
In proof of the antiquity of their knowledge of letters, the Regent 
and his friends urged the similarity of their alphabet to the Sanscrit 
j 
character, from which they avow it to have been formed; but they 
profess to have departed a little from the shape and form of the origi¬ 
nal, when they applied it to express a different language. Still, how¬ 
ever, the character in which their sacred writings are preserved and 
printed, styled Ucken , bears a strong resemblance to the Sanscrit; and 
is quite as distinct from the character of business and correspondence, 
called Umin , as the old Roman text is from the English round hand. 
I began now to think it high time to close the interview, which had 
been protracted to an uncommon length, especially when the Regent 
himself informed me, that he had fixed upon the morrow for a journey 
towards the western frontier, and that he designed to visit the hot-wells 
previous to his return, telling me that his health, no less than public 
