The courtyard was gay with fluttering prayer-flags, the poles of which as well as the wooden pillars of the arcades were hung with the beautiful banners artistically worked with countless pieces of coloured silks and brocades and needlework pictures of Buddhist gods and saints for which the monasteries of Bhutan are justly famed. From the blue sky the sun blazed on the riot of mingled hues of the decorations and the dresses of spectators and performers. Especially gorgeous were the robes of the high priests in the spectacle. They strongly resembled Catholic bishops in their gold-embroidered mitres, copes and vestments as, carrying pastoral crooks or sprinkling holy water, they moved around the courtyard in solemn procession behind acolytes carrying sacred banners, swinging censers and intoning harmonious chants. Troops of baffled demons fled at their approach howling in diabolic despair. Shuddering wretches clad in scanty rags, groping blindly as in the dark, wailing miserably and uttering weird, long-drawn whistling notes, shrank aside from the fleeing devils and stretched out their hands in supplication to the saintly prelates. They were intended to represent the spirits of dead men straying in the period of _Bardo_--the forty-nine days after death--during which the soul released from the body is doomed to wander in search of its next incarnation. In its journeyings it is assailed and terrified by demons, who can only be defeated by the prayers of pious lamas to Chenresi the Great Pitier. The whole purpose of these representations is to familiarise during life the devout Buddhists with the awful aspect of the many demons that will obstruct their souls after death and try to lead them astray when they are searching for the right path to the next world in which they are to begin a fresh existence. On this strange, bewildering spectacle an English girl looked down from a small balcony not twenty feet above the courtyard. And the sight of her caused the attention of many of the spectators to wander from the Mystery Play. The fat old Penlop frequently looked across the quadrangle at her from his gallery and as often uttered some coarse jest about her to his grinning followers, while he raised a chased silver goblet filled with _murwa_, the native liquor, to his lips.