The next morning, after crossing the Arun at the Arun Bridge, we reached Shekar, where we had a great reception. The Dzongpen played up, and he had no less than 160 mules all collected and ready for us the following morning; and not only that, but every one turned out the evening, and we had a little race meeting of our own and a great tea with exchange of cakes and compliments with the Dzongpen himself. Altogether we were evidently in very good favour both with the Dzongpen and with the great Lama of Shekar. Noel and others paid a very interesting visit to the great Lama, and were shown by him his collections of curios of all kinds. They thought at first that the old gentleman prized and guarded these as Gömpa property, but they were rather surprised to discover that he was perfectly ready to sell at a price—and that his own. He was by far the shrewdest trader that we had come across in Tibet. Most of the things that he was ready to part with, however, were beyond the pockets of our party. John Macdonald, who has a very good eye for a pony, took out a likely mount in the horse-races and himself won no less than three races that day. He bargained for it, as he was looking forward to the Darjeeling pony-races in the autumn, and before we left Macdonald, to his great joy, had concluded a very respectable bargain. [Illustration: PANORAMA AT SHEKAR DZONG. ] The following morning we got off not quite as well as we should. We had difficulty in loading and some difficulties on the march. Shekar had proved altogether too much for the porters and the following morning they were not of much use; in fact, it was with the greatest difficulty that many of them were produced at the next camp. The place was called Kyishong. It had not been a very promising little camp, so we thought of stopping down by the river on a very pleasant plot of grass, but on arrival there we found a dead Tibetan in a basket moored to the bank in the water about a hundred yards above our camp, so that was no place for us. Instead of marching back exactly the same way we had come, viâ our camp at Gyangka-Nangpa, we determined to follow up a smaller branch of the Arun which would bring us finally down on to Tinki itself. By so doing we avoided wading the Yaru in two places, and also the rather high and steep Tinki Pass. On our way across the plains of Teng, before one arrives at the great sand dunes of Shiling, we passed a Sokpo, a true Mongolian, whose home was in Northern Mongolia, near Urga, a religious devotee. He was travelling from Lhasa to Nepal, that is, to Khatmandu, on a pilgrimage, by the time-honoured method of measuring his length on the ground for every advance. He was a young man and apparently well fed, trusting to the kindness of the villages through which he passed for his food. He told us that he had been continually travelling and that it had taken him one year to reach the place where we found him