The Golden Glory of Tibet
IN the far, far distance, across and beyond flat fields of barley, and here and there the darker line of low-wooded plantations, a gray pyramid painfully disengaged itself from behind the outer point of the gray concealing spur—Lhasa. Here, at last, the never-reached goal of so many weary wanderers, the home of all the occult mysticism that still remains on earth! The light waves of mirage dissolving impalpably just shook the far outlines of the golden roofs and dimly seen white terraces. From end to end the plain around the capital is almost without exception a water-sodden morass, on which it is almost12impossible to travel for a hundred yards without encountering a quagmire. The road by which one approaches the capital is a causeway built four or five feet up from the surface of the marsh, and pierced a dozen times by culverts, through which brown, peaty water flows apace. In length the Plain of Milk, in the middle of which Lhasa lies, is about fifteen miles. In width it varies from two to five miles. And in upon it from all sides strike the spurs of vast mountains, which even then, in July, were snow-capped in the morning hours. Between the palace on our left and the town a mile away in front of us there interposes a mile-wide belt of green. In this Lhasa has a feature which no other town on earth can rival. Between and over the glades and woodlands the city itself peeps, an adobe stretch of narrow streets and flat-topped houses, crowned here and there with a blaze of golden roofs or gilded cupolas. But there is no time to look at this; a man can have no eye for anything but the huge, upstanding mass of the Potala palace to his left. It drags the eye of the mind like a lodestone, for, indeed, sheer bulk and magnificent audacity could do no more in architecture than they have in the palace temple of the Grand Lama. Simplicity has wrought a marvel in stone, nine hundred feet in length, and towering seventy feet higher than the golden cross of St. Paul's Cathedral. By European standards it is impossible to judge this building. Perhaps in the austerity of its huge curtains of blank, unveiled, unornamented wall, and in the flat, unabashed slants of its tremendous southeastern face, there is a suggestion of the massive grandeur of Egyptian work, but the contrast of color and surroundings, to which no small part of the magnificence of the sight is due, Egypt can not boast. The vivid white stretches of the buttressing curtains of stone, each a wilderness of close-ranked windows, and the home of the hundreds of the crimson-clad dwarfs who sun themselves at the distant stair-heads, strike a clean and harmonious note in the sea of green which washes up to their base. Once a year the walls of the Potala are washed with white, and no one can gainsay the effect. Moreover, a brown yak-hair curtain, eighty feet in height and twenty-five feet across, hangs like a tress of hair down the very center of the central sanctuary, hiding the central recess. The central building of the palace, the private home of the incarnate divinity himself, stands out foursquare upon and between the wide, supporting bulks of masonry, a deep-red crimson, and, most perfect touch of all, over it, against the sky, are glittering golden roofs. Just where the dun town encroaches upon the greenery, you may see clearly the famous Turquoise-Roofed Bridge. To the right is the house of the Amban, the Chinese representative in Lhasa, almost completely hidden in its trees, and on the other side rise the steep, unbeautiful walls of the last house in Lhasa to the northeast; to the west of it flashes the corner of Ramo-che, the most sacred of all the temples in Tibet. But when you have marked these historic points, the eye will helplessly revert again to the Potala; it is a new glory added to the known architecture of the world.—Perceval Landon, in The World's Work.