Note 12 — INTRODUCTION.

With the approach of winter he left Zanskár, and towards the end of November 1824 arrived at Sabathú. In the letter which he wrote during his stay there, in January 1825, he says, “At my first entrance to the British Indian territory, I was fully persuaded I should be received as a friend by the Government.” Nor was he disappointed. As at Bagdad and Teheran, so in India was the Hungarian pilgrim welcomed and assisted by the British authorities. In 1826 he seems (says Dr. Archibald Campbell12) to have paid a second visit to Western Tibet, and to have continued “to study in the monasteries of that country, living in the poorest possible manner,” till 1831. In the autumn of that year Dr. Campbell met him at Simla, “dressed in a coarse blue cloth loose gown, extending to his heels, and a small cloth cap of the same material. He wore a grizzly beard, shunned the society of Europeans, and passed his whole time in study.” It is much to be regretted that he has left no record of his residence in the monasteries in which he passed so long a time, in one of which, “with the thermometer below zero for more than four months, he was precluded by the severity of the weather from stirring out of a room nine feet square. Yet in this situation he read from morning till evening without a fire, the ground forming his bed, and the walls of the building his protection against the rigours of the climate, and still he collected and arranged forty thousand words in the language of Tibet, and nearly completed his Dictionary and Grammar.”13 Day after day, says M. Pavie,14 he would sit in a wretched hut at the door of a monastery, reading aloud Buddhistic works with a Lama by his side. When a page was finished, the two readers would nudge each other’s elbows. The question was which of them was to turn over the leaf, thereby exposing his hand for the moment, unprotected by the long-furred sleeve, to the risk of being frost-bitten.