Years passed, and I saw no more of monasteries till we went to Omi's sacred mountain in the far, far west of China.
At one temple, at which we tried to spend the night, we were met by point-blank refusal. The priests said their rooms were full. We might have believed them, had they risen to receive us and offered us tea. But meeting with cold incivility, we believed rather the Temple of the Elephants' Pool was too rich to be beguiled by foreign offerings into receiving heretics, as we pushed on through the gathering night and rising mist up and up along a _col_-like knife-edge and by beautiful trees to a little temple, where they did their best to make us comfortable according to our to them most strange tastes, and then begged like beggars for some of my husband's clothes, because the young priest in charge of the temple had set his foolish fancy on trying foreign clothes, and like a child could not be turned from his point.
At the top of the mountain we spent a fortnight in the Golden Monastery. The priest whose especial duty it was to entertain strangers received us from the first with great courtesy, but he informed us that anything we ate must be eaten in the privacy of our own apartment. And as at first we had none (for we could not, till we had tried all round and failed, resign ourselves to one room giving on to the mountain-side, out of which it had been dug, and with only one window, that did not open), this resulted in our taking our first meal upon the mountain-top _al fresco_ on the grass, the monastery, however, very kindly supplying us with hot water for our tea. Then, finding no other temple could or would receive us, we promised to take no life whilst upon the sacred mountain, and only to eat our shocking foreign food in the one room assigned to us, having it cooked in the adjoining one, given over to our two servants and eight coolies. The priests used to come in and out all day, and offer us tea and sweetmeats; but they never would even drink tea out of our cups, for fear of any defilement of previous milk still clinging round them. That monastery struck us as both strict and carefully managed, the chief priest, who had the air and bearing of a saint, spending hours in solitary devotion in the temple on the verge of the great precipice.