gate the King takes off his royal cap, and changing his clothes for new ones proceeds barefooted, with flowers and incense in his hand, from the city, followed by his attendants. On meeting the image he bows down his head and worships at its feet, scattering the flowers and burning the incense. On entering the city the Queen and Court ladies scatter about all kinds of flowers and throw them down in wild profusion. So splendid are the arrangements for worship!"[4] Thus writes Fa Hian, and it is sufficient to testify to the strength of Buddhism and the magnificence of its ritual in the third century of our era, when India still held the chief fountains of inspiration ere the holy of holies was transferred to Lhasa and the pilgrim route was changed. So far, then, we need not look for the influence exercised by the most recent climatic pulsation of Central Asia which has dried up the water-springs and allowed the sand-drifts to accumulate above many of the minor townships of the Lop basin, in order to account for the trend of Asiatic religious history towards Tibet. It was the gradual decay of the faith, and its final departure from its birthplace in the plains of India in later centuries, which sent pilgrims on another track, and left many of the northern routes to be rediscovered by European explorers in the nineteenth century. Most of the Chinese pilgrims visited Khotan, but from Khotan onward their steps were bent in several directions. Some of them visited Ki-pin, which has been identified with the upper Kabul River basin. Here, indeed, were scattered a wealth of Buddhist records to be studied, shrines to be visited, and temples to be seen. The road from Balkh to Kabul and from Kabul to the Punjab was pre-eminently a Buddhist route. Balkh, Haibak, and Bamian all testify, as does the neighbourhood of Kabul itself, to the existence of a lively Buddhist history before the Mahomedan Conquest, and between Kabul and India there are Buddhist remains near Jalalabad which rival in splendour those of the Swat valley and the Upper Punjab. All these places were objects of devout attention undoubtedly, but to reach Kabul _via_ Balkh from Khotan it would be necessary to cross the Pamirs and Badakshan. It is not easy to follow in detail the footsteps of these devotees, but it is obvious that until they entered the "Tsungling" mountains they remained north of the great trans-Himalayan ranges and of the Hindu Kush. The Tsungling was the dreaded barrier between China and India, and the wild tales of the horrors which attended the crossing of the mountains testify to the fact that they were not much easier of access or transit at the beginning of the Christian era than they are now.