Alternating with the wheels are stone shrines graven with Tibetan characters, before which, on wooden couches, silken-dressed women are abasing themselves in abject worship. A long line of pilgrims is doing the circle of the city. They stand, then drop prostrate in the snow. Rising, they move conscientiously forward to where their heads touched, and again lie prone, making thus a penitential circuit of the stockade. Most are in deadly earnest. Some, hired for a proxy service, steal forward a few inches on each prostration. Suddenly three distant guns boom out. “_Scurry, scurry toda!_” says the wool-merchant. “Quick, this way. He is coming.” You hurry forward to where a trail leads across the square. Afar off, in the direction of the Holy Mountain, is seen a band of galloping cavalry. The Mongols on horseback around you are drawing rein. The pilgrims are looking toward the approaching cavalcade. Brilliant red and yellow are the robes that flutter as the body-guard ride. Now a rumble of wheels is heard among the clattering hoofs. Preceded by twenty horsemen, followed by twenty more, rolls down a Russian droshky, with a yellow-robed lama driving. Propped among the multicolored cushions sits a clean-shaven, silk-robed man, with puffy cheeks and tired eyes. The European watch which he carries hangs in anomalous awkwardness at the breast of his robe; his leg is propped on the front seat, as if he were lame. Most turn their backs to him in Oriental honoring; many prostrate themselves in the snow; every horseman in the square has dismounted. “He drives from his palace beside the Holy Mountain to the temple on the hill beyond the city,” says the wool-merchant. “But who is it?” we ask, as the last galloper rides by. The Russian looks at us as an old Roman might, if in the Forum we had not recognized Cæsar. “That! That’s Gigin, the Living God! That’s Buddha come back to earth,--Gigin!” You stand a moment to take it all in. Then, despite your purpose of respect, a smile works to the front. At once the wool-merchant laughs gleefully. “Ask Varlakoff about the Buddha,” he chuckles. “Varlakoff sold him his ponies for ten thousand roubles. My friend showed him a picture of the ponies, little horses, you know, and Gigin told him to get them. They had to send to an island of Europe, Scotland. But Gigin was very pleased. He said Varlakoff was the only man who had never lied to him.” The expression of the wool-merchant was that worn according to tradition by the Roman augurs. “When there is not a holiday, the people have the market here in this square,” the merchant continues. “I was here in the bazaar with a friend last week, and we heard a commotion over by that prayer-wheel. We went up, to find that two of the Buddha’s lamas were borrowing a fine horse, worth three hundred roubles, which belonged to a Mongol woman. It was all she had, she told us, and it was being taken to the Living God’s stables. The woman was in great distress.