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Here I may add that I made another find of manuscripts of a very different character at Leh. In the Mission library at Leb, I found a good number of my old hand-written books which I had collected in former years and quite forgotten. As they contain many hundreds of pages of hitherto unpublished folklore, I carried them off with me and sold them to Government for the benefit of the Mission, together with another collection of unpublished folklore which I had still in my possession. Among these latter manuscripts was a sheet which contained a kind of introduction to the cryptic alphabet used in Tibetan seals. The inscription on the Dalai Laura's seal, among many others, is written in this alphabet. How gratifying it was to find that my sheet from Leh proved to be the correct key to the reading of the Dalai Lama's seal.' Among my treasures are several hymnals relating to the pre-Buddhist religion of Ladakh which, I hope, it will be possible to translate in course of time.
At Changspa, a village half a mile from Leh, there is the large residence of a family of ministers (bka-blon) of the former Ladakhi kingdom. In a garden-house (rab-gsal) belonging to the minister's estate are the remains of frescoes illustrating the Kesar-Saga. Several years ago, I ordered one of them to be copied by a local painter. This time, I had photos taken of three of them, in addition to a copy in colours executed by a local artist. The frescoes in the garden house will soon be gone altogether, and as pictures relating to the Kesar-Saga are very rare, I was resolved to save for science what could be saved. All the frescoes in this hall refer to a chapter of the Kesar-Saga, entitled Ljang-dmag, " the war against the country of Ljang," as we find it in the literary version of the Kesar-Saga. Let me remark that the famous epic of Tibet, the Kesar or Gesar Saga, is preserved in two versions which are very different from one another. One of them, the oral version, exists only in the mouths of the people, whilst the literary version is found in several manuscripts in Ladakh, and possibly even in woodprints. All my publications with regard to the Kesar-Saga deal only with its oral version. A manuscript of the literary version of the Saga is in the hands of the present ex-minister of Changspa. From an article by Schiefner2 it is evident that it was the Changspa minister's Gesar manuscript, which was copied for the Imperial collection of manuscripts in St. Petersburg. Up to the present, nobody seems to have been able to read and translate it. This is very natural, considering the extreme difficulties of its language. K. Marx says that it is written in the Khams dialect. As there are people here at Changspa who can read and understand the Saga, their knowledge ought to be utilised for the benefit of science. I copied all the wall-inscriptions relative to the frescoes which it was still possible to decipher. The following notes on the dress of the pre-Buddhist divinities represented in the frescoes, may be of iconographical interest : dBang-po-rgyab-zhiu has a red coat, and white cloak with blue seam ; Gog-bzanglha-mo is dressed in white, but her trousers are red, and she has a green shawl ; one of her sons (Don-yod P ) has a red jacket with green seams ; another of her sons (Don-ldan )
I Cf. J. R. A. S. 1910. p. 1205.
2 Publications of the Imperial Academy of Science at St. Petersburg, entitled " Zees .lfissionar Jäschke's Bemii• ii ungen uni eine IIandsclrrift des Ge.Yar. "
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