[Illustration: TEMPLE IN THE URGA LAMASERY] For this we start. The Russian section, made up of shops with posters and signs in Slavonic letters, and homes with centre chimneys and little square panes of glass, is left behind. Through a long dark lane we come out into the main thoroughfare of Mongol Urga. The town is in festival for the New Moon. The streets are ablaze with color. Red posters are on every door and wall. The brilliant picture is framed by the snowy girding hills and the green trees of the Holy Mountain to the south. The tomb-like altars on the plain are dazzlingly white against the gray-plastered fronts of the houses behind. The gilded gargoyles of the temples flash in the sun. Down the main street, a hundred feet broad, go bevies of girls, their hair bedecked with the gaudiest ornaments of silver and pearl, their silken robes striped and banded in green alternating with yellow and blue and gold. Lamas stride here and there dressed in bright orange robes and hats, their silver knives hanging at their sides. Great shaggy-haired dromedaries swing past. Horsemen, robed in vivid scarlet and blue and magenta, dash at full gallop across the wide open _piazza_ in the centre of the town. A donkey-cart is driven slowly along, crowded with brightly-dressed girls. A squad of Chinese cavalry trot by in white jackets, red-lettered. Two of the Cossack garrison swagger past. A bearded Siberian trader strolls across, clothed in the dark Mongolian cloak which most have adopted, going toward the Russian quarter we have just left. A string of oxen plods by, drawing cartloads of wood. Walking on, we come to a long line of kiosks which a continuous procession of pilgrims in holiday attire is entering. In each booth is a cask-shaped prayer-wheel, a magnified model of those which women carry, twirling them in their hands as they walk. Along this main square of Urga, and girding her city stockade, are hundreds of these cylinders. All the day long, men and women are going in and out from one kiosk to another, turning. Some say that formerly one could enter a great Tibetan temple only after saying a prayer so long that even a Grand Lama’s memory could not carry it. So, for convenience, a cylinder with the written text was set up at the temple gate. By degrees it became the custom, without reading it, to rotate the petition for a blessing. Others say that the wheels are whirled in literal obedience to Buddha’s precept to “turn over and over his words.”