An Embassy to the Court of the Teshoo Lama in Tibet - Prajna Quest

;282 TIBET.from intercourse with strangers, and shut out from the rest of the worldby inaccessible mountains, by Imaus, on the one hand, and by the inhospitabledeserts of Gobi, on the other, is not with reason to be expectedand still less is itto be sought for, in more northerly regions, where oneJialf of the year is a season of profound darkness, and the wretchedinhabitants are compelled to seek rcfiige from the severity of the seasons,in deep and gloomy caverns ; where, possibly, the powers andfaculties of the mind, are in some degree benumbed by the same powerfuloperation of intense cold, which arrests the progress of vegetablelife ;and where, certainly, the great mass of the people are doomed tolabour perpetually, for the scanty and precarious support of mereanimal existence.In proof of the antiquity of their knowledge of letters, the Regentand his friends urged the similarity of their alphabet to the Sanscritcharacter, from which they avow it to have been formed; but theyprofess to have departed alittle from the shape and form of the original,when they applied it to express a different language. Still, however,thecharacter in which their sacred writings are preserved andprinted, styled Lklien, bears a suong resemblance to the Sanscrit; andisquite as distinct from the ciiaracter of business and correspondence,called Umin, as the old Roman text isfrom the English round hand.I began now to think ithigh time to close the interview, which hadbeen protracted to an uncommon length, especially when the Regenthimself informed me, that he had fixed upon the morrow for a journeytowards the western frontier, and that he designed to visit the hot-wellsprevious to his return, telling me that his health, no less than public