engaged upon the harvest; and when it is over, they will return to winter in the monastery built upon the left bank of the river.
We are now in a Buddhist country, in a land where the people believe in the transmigration of the soul from one body to another. This does not tend to respect for the human body or to regard for the dead. While walking through the reed-beds in search of small birds for our natural history collection, my foot comes into contact with the upper part of a human skull. It is quite white, stripped cleaner than could have been done by the cleverest medical student. Upon examining it, I find that it was the very image of the Kirghis skulls which I have had in my hand in Turkestan, there being the same depression of the occiput, the same breadth of cheek, the same prominent eyebrows, the same protruding cheek-bones, but with the forehead apparently less developed and rather lower, though quite as receding. We may assume that this skull was that of a man who did not possess any very marked intelligence, who was short in stature—as I learnt from the thigh-bone, which I picked up a little further—and who had excellent teeth, as is proved by a fragment of his lower jaw. The bits of clothing hanging from the thorn-bushes show that he was not a man of wealth. This was the place where his remains were exposed as soon as the soul had passed into a better body. Four stakes, with bits of stuff at the end of them, indicated that the corpse was deposited there, and the wild beasts, the birds of prey, and no doubt the dogs from the adjoining tents, have cleared away the terrestrial envelope of this Mongol, devouring his flesh and grinding his bones, and then time and the weather completed the work of destruction. There remain only a whitened skull, a half-gnawed thigh-bone, and a fragment of jaw; the soul has taken its flight, and the bits of stuff at the end of the stakes are praying for it, for, inscribed in black letters
