He describes a visit to the cell of one of those thus immured: "The abbot led us into a small courtyard which had blank walls all round it, over which a peach-tree reared its transparent pink and white against the sky. Almost on a level with the ground there was an opening closed with a flat stone from behind. In front of this window was a ledge eighteen inches in width with two basins beside it, and one at each end. The abbot was attended by an acolyte, who, by his master's orders, tapped three times sharply on the stone slab. We stood in the little courtyard in the sun and watched that wicket with cold apprehension. I think, on the whole, it was the most uncanny thing I saw in all Tibet. What on earth was going to appear when that stone slab, which even then was beginning weakly to quiver, was pushed aside, the wildest conjecture could not suggest. After half-a-minute's pause the stone moved, or tried to move, but it came to rest again. Then, very slowly and uncertainly it was pushed back, and a black chasm was revealed. There was a pause of thirty seconds, during which imagination ran riot, but I do not think that any other thing could have been so intensely pathetic as that which we actually saw. A hand, muffled in a tightly wound piece of dirty cloth, for all the world like the stump of an arm, was painfully thrust up, and very weakly it felt along the slab. After a fruitless fumbling the hand slowly quivered back again into the darkness. A few moments later there was again one ineffectual effort, and then the stone slab moved noiselessly again across the opening. Once a day water and an unleavened cake of flour is placed for the prisoner upon that slab, the signal is given, and he may take it in. His diversion is over for the day, and in the darkness of his cell, where night and day, noon, sunset, and the dawn are all alike, the poor soul has thought that another day of his long penance was over." Here is another account from the pen of Sven Hedin. He visited the monastery of Sumde-pu-pe, where was a hermitage consisting of a single room five paces each way, built over a spring that bubbles up in the centre. Inside the hermit had been walled up with only a tiny tunnel communicating with the outside world. Once inside, he was never again to see the light of day nor hear a human voice. The man Sven Hedin saw had been immured for sixty-nine years, and wished to see the sun again. "He was all bent up as small as a child, and his body was nothing but a light-grey parchment-like skin and bones. His eyes had lost their colour, and were quite bright and blind. Of the monks who sixty-nine years before had conducted him to the cell not one survived.... And he had scarcely been carried out into the sunlight when he too, gave up the ghost." [Footnote: "Trans-Himalaya: Discoveries and Adventures in Tibet," Lond. 1910.]