But now all the Bho were Buddhists, so on top of every community was perched a lamasarai, called by its inhabitants the Pota-lá. (Lá meant mount, and Pota was the Bho pronunciation of Buddha. And I will not make ribald word-play on that fact, from the indecorous meaning of “pota” in the Venetian tongue. No one has any need to invent derisions of the Bho and their religion.) The Pota-la being the topmost and most populous building in every community, the result was that the priests and monks—here called lamas and trapas—excreted copiously on all their lay congregation downhill. I was to find that Buddhism, in its To-Bhot form of Potaism, was dismally degraded by even stranger lunacies.

A Bho town might look charming when we saw it from afar—say, across the landscape of the huge blue-and-yellow poppies unique to To-Bhot, and the “Pota’s hair” willow trees hung with yellow bloom, and the clear blue sky speckled pink and black with rose finches and ravens. Any cliffside town was a vertical jumble of cliff-colored houses, distinguishable from the cliff because they oozed smoke from their little windows—curiously shaped windows, wider at the top than at the bottom—and that clutter of houses was overtopped by the even more jumbled Pota-lá, all turrets and gilded roofs and promenades and outside staircases and varicolored pennants flapping in the breeze, and dark-robed trapas pacing sedately about the terraces. But when we got closer, what had appeared from a distance comely, serene, even holy of aspect, was revealed to be ugly, torpid and squalid.

The quaint little windows of the town’s residences were set only in the upper stories, to be above the ghastly mess and smell of the streets. The populace at first seemed to consist only of wandering goats and fowl and skulking yellow mastiffs, and the steep, narrow, twisty alleys were thick with droppings we assumed to be theirs. But then we would begin to meet people, and wish we had been satisfied with the cleaner animals, because when the people stuck out their tongues in greeting, we could see that their tongues were the only un-dirt-caked things about them. They wore robes as drab and grimy as had the people in the lowlands; if males and females wore differing patterns of the drabness and griminess, I could not discern them. There were very few men, and a great many women, but I could tell the sexes apart because the men took the trouble to open their long robes when they urinated in the street; the women simply squatted; they wore nothing under their outer robes, or I hoped they did not. Sometimes a larger than ordinary heap of dung in the street would stir feebly, and I would see that it was a human being laid out to die, usually a very old man or woman.

My Mongol escorts confided to me that the Bho, in former times, disposed of their old folks by eating their corpses—on the theory that the dead could wish no finer resting place than the guts of their own get—and had discontinued that practice only after Potaism became the prevailing religion, because the Pota-Buddha had frowned on the eating of meat. The only relic of the former custom was that families now conserved the skulls of their dead and made them into drinking bowls or little drums, so that the departed could still partake of holiday feasts and music making. Nowadays the Bho observed four other methods of sepulture. They burned the dead on mountaintops, or left them there for the birds, or they threw them into the rivers and ponds from which they got their drinking water, or they cut the corpses into pieces and fed them to dogs. The latter was the method most preferred, because that hastened the dissolution of the flesh, and until the old flesh was gone, its habitant soul was marooned in a sort of Purgatory between death here and rebirth elsewhere. The bodies of the poor were merely thrown to the packs of street curs, but the bodies of the rich were conveyed to special lamasarais which maintained kennels of sanctified mastiffs.

Those practices doubtless accounted for To-Bhot’s teeming population of scavenger vultures and ravens and magpies and dogs, but they also accounted for more humans’ dying than necessary. The dogs were so many that they were exceedingly liable to the canine madness, and in their fits they bit people as well as each other. More of the Bho were slain by the canine infection than by all the vile diseases engendered by their own squalor. Often, the heap in the street would be not just feebly stirring, but writhing and contorting and howling like a dog, in the terrible death agonies of that madness.

Because I had no wish to be bitten, and because I was on my way to war, I procured a bow and arrows and began to improve my aim and my arm by shooting every stray dog that came within range. That earned me black looks from the religious and the lay Potaists alike, who would rather that people die for no reason than that people should kill for good reason. However, since I carried the Khakhan’s plaque, no one dared to do more than scowl and mutter, and I became quite proficient with both the broad-head and narrow-head arrows, and I hope I effected some small improvement in that wretched land, but I doubt it. I doubt that anyone or anything could.

On our arrival in any Bho community, my escorts and I climbed as quickly as we could to the Pota-lá on top, where we honored visitors were always put up, it affording the best of local accommodations. That meant only that we did not get excreted on from above—though, if we had, it could not have made the rooms and the bedding and the food and the company much filthier. Before leaving Kithai, I had heard a Han gentleman quote a contemptuous saying of his people—that the three national products of To-Bhot were lamas, women and dogs—and now I believed him. It was apparent that the disproportionate number of women in the town down the hill was owing to the fact that at least a third of their men had taken holy orders and residence in some lamasarai. Having seen the Bho women, I could not much fault the Bho men for having fled, but I did think that they might have fled to some existence better than a living embalmment.

Entering a Pota-lá courtyard, we were greeted first by the creaking, fluttering and clattering of prayer mills, prayer flags and prayer bones, then by the roars and snarls of the savage yellow To-Bhot mastiffs, which in those places were at least kept chained to the walls. Also along those walls, in every least niche, there was incense or a juniper sprig burning, but its perfume was insufficient to mask the overall miasma of yak-dung fires, putrid yak butter and unwashed religiosity. After meeting the noise and the stench, we met a number of monks and a few priests plodding majestically toward us, each of them holding out across his palms the khata, the pale blue silk scarf with which (instead of his tongue) every upper-class Bho salutes an equal or superior. They addressed me as Kungö, which means “Highness,” and I properly addressed each lama as Kundün, “Presence,” and each trapa as Rimpoche, “Treasured One”—though it nearly gagged me to utter such honorific lies. I could see nothing treasurable about any of them. Their robes, which had first seemed to be of ecclesiastically sedate colors, could be seen up close to have been originally bright red, and were dark only from years of accumulated dirt. Their faces, hands and shaved heads were blotched with a brown plant-sap they daubed on their various skin diseases, and their chins and chops were shiny with the yak butter that drenched everything they ate.

In the matter of foods at the lamasarais, we were most often served Potaist vegetable meals, of course—tsampa, boiled nettles, ferns—and a strange, stringy, slimy, bright-pink stalk of some plant unknown to me. I suspect that the holy men ate it only because it made one’s urine pink for days afterward, and that effluent trickle no doubt awed the people downhill of the lamasarai. But the Bho had a peculiar selectivity about the Potaist injunction against eating meat. They would not slaughter domestic fowl or cattle, but would allow the slaying of game pheasants and antelope. So the lamas and trapas sometimes provided those venisons for us, as an excuse for them to enjoy the meats as well. (I am not unjustly scoffing at their hypocrite austerities. One lama was introduced to me as “a most holy of holy men” because he subsisted on “absolutely no nourishment except a few bowls of cha a day.” Out of skeptic curiosity, I kept a close eye on that lama, and eventually caught him in the preparation of his mealtime bowl. It was not cha leaves he used in the steeping, but cha-like shreds of dried meat.)