Kim

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'Humph! The end of the tale, I think, is true; but what of the
fore-part?'

'About the Five Kings? Oah! there is ever so much truth in it. A
lots more than you would suppose,' said Hurree earnestly. 'You come
- eh? I go from here straight into the Doon. It is verree verdant
and painted meads. I shall go to Mussoorie to good old Munsoorie
Pahar, as the gentlemen and ladies say. Then by Rampur into Chini.
That is the only way they can come. I do not like waiting in the
cold, but we must wait for them. I want to walk with them to Simla.
You see, one Russian is a Frenchman, and I know my French pretty
well. I have friends in Chandernagore.'

'He would certainly rejoice to see the Hills again,' said Kim
meditatively. 'All his speech these ten days past has been of little
else. If we go together -'

'Oah! We can be quite strangers on the road, if your lama prefers. I
shall just be four or five miles ahead. There is no hurry for Hurree
- that is an Europe pun, ha! ha! - and you come after. There is
plenty of time; they will plot and survey and map, of course. I
shall go tomorrow, and you the next day, if you choose. Eh? You go
think on it till morning. By Jove, it is near morning now.' He
yawned ponderously, and with never a civil word lumbered off to his
sleeping-place. But Kim slept little, and his thoughts ran in
Hindustani:

'Well is the Game called great! I was four days a scullion at
Quetta, waiting on the wife of the man whose book I stole. And that
was part of the Great Game! From the South - God knows how far -
came up the Mahratta, playing the Great Game in fear of his life.
Now I shall go far and far into the North playing the Great Game.
Truly, it runs like a shuttle throughout all Hind. And my share and
my joy' - he smiled to the darkness-'I owe to the lama here. Also to
Mahbub Ali - also to Creighton Sahib, but chiefly to the Holy One.
He is right - a great and a wonderful world - and I am Kim - Kim -
Kim - alone - one person - in the middle of it all. But I will see
these strangers with their levels and chains . . .'

'What was the upshot of last night's babble?' said the lama, after
his orisons

'There came a strolling seller of drugs - a hanger-on of the
Sahiba's. Him I abolished by arguments and prayers, proving that
our charms are worthier than his coloured waters.'

'Alas, my charms! Is the virtuous woman still bent upon a new one?'

'Very strictly.'

'Then it must be written, or she will deafen me with her clamour.'
He fumbled at his pencase.

'In the Plains,' said Kim, 'are always too many people. In the
Hills, as I understand, there are fewer.'

'Oh! the Hills, and the snows upon the Hills.' The lami tore off a
tiny square of paper fit to go in an amulet. 'But what dost thou
know of the Hills?'

'They are very close.' Kim thrust open the door and looked at the
long, peaceful line of the Himalayas flushed in morning- gold.
'Except in the dress of a Sahib, I have never set foot among them.'

The lama snuffed the wind wistfully.

'If we go North,' - Kim put the question to the waking sunrise -
'would not much mid-day heat be avoided by walking among the lower
hills at least? ... Is the charm made, Holy One?'

'I have written the names of seven silly devils - not one of whom is
worth a grain of dust in the eye. Thus do foolish women drag us
from the Way!'

Hurree Babu came out from behind the dovecote washing his teeth with
ostentatious ritual. Full-fleshed, heavy-haunched, bull-necked, and
deep-voiced, he did not look like 'a fearful man'. Kim signed
almost imperceptibly that matters were in good train, and when the
morning toilet was over, Hurree Babu, in flowery speech, came to do
honour to the lama. They ate, of course, apart, and afterwards the
old lady, more or less veiled behind a window, returned to the vital
business of green-mango colics in the young. The lama's knowledge of
medicine "was, of course, sympathetic only. He believed that the
dung of a black horse, mixed with sulphur, and carried in a snake-
skin, was a sound remedy for cholera; but the symbolism interested
him far more than the science. Hurree Babu deferred to these views
with enchanting politeness, so that the lama called him a courteous
physician. Hurree Babu replied that he was no more than an inexpert
dabbler in the mysteries; but at least - he thanked the Gods
therefore - he knew when he sat in the presence of a master. He
himself had been taught by the Sahibs, who do not consider expense,
in the lordly halls of Calcutta; but, as he was ever first to
acknowledge, there lay a wisdom behind earthly wisdom - the high and
lonely lore of meditation. Kim looked on with envy. The Hurree Babu
of his knowledge - oily, effusive, and nervous - was gone; gone,
too, was the brazen drug-vendor of overnight. There remained -
polished, polite, attentive - a sober, learned son of experience and
adversity, gathering wisdom from the lama's lips. The old lady
confided to Kim that these rare levels were beyond her. She liked
charms with plenty of ink that one could wash off in water, swallow,
and be done with. Else what was the use of the Gods? She liked men
and women, and she spoke of them - of kinglets she had known in the
past; of her own youth and beauty; of the depredations of leopards
and the eccentricities of love Asiatic; of the incidence of
taxation, rack-renting, funeral ceremonies, her son-in-law (this by
allusion, easy to be followed), the care of the young, and the age's
lack of decency. And Kim, as interested in the life of this world as
she soon to leave it, squatted with his feet under the hem of his
robe, drinking all in, while the lama demolished one after another
every theory of body-curing put forward by Hurree Babu.

At noon the Babu strapped up his brass-bound drug-box, took his
patent-leather shoes of ceremony in one hand, a gay blue-and-white
umbrella in the other, and set off northwards to the Doon, where, he
said, he was in demand among the lesser kings of those parts.

'We will go in the cool of the evening, chela,' said the lama. 'That
doctor, learned in physic and courtesy, affirms that the people
among these lower hills are devout, generous, and much in need of a
teacher. In a very short time - so says the hakim - we come to cool
air and the smell of pines.'

'Ye go to the Hills? And by Kulu road? Oh, thrice happy!' shrilled
the old lady. 'But that I am a little pressed with the care of the
homestead I would take palanquin ... but that would be shameless,
and my reputation would be cracked. Ho! Ho! I know the road - every
march of the road I know. Ye will find charity throughout - it is
not denied to the well-looking. I will give orders for provision. A
servant to set you forth upon your journey? No ... Then I will at
least cook ye good food.'

'What a woman is the Sahiba!' said the white-bearded Oorya, when a
tumult rose by the kitchen quarters. 'She has never forgotten a
friend: she has never forgotten an enemy in all her years. And her
cookery - wah!' He rubbed his slim stomach.

There were cakes, there were sweetmeats, there was cold fowl stewed
to rags with rice and prunes - enough to burden Kim like a mule.

'I am old and useless,' she said. 'None now love me - and none
respect - but there are few to compare with me when I call on the
Gods and squat to my cooking-pots. Come again, O people of good
will. Holy One and disciple, come again. The room is always
prepared; the welcome is always ready ... See the women do not
follow thy chela too openly. I know the women of Kulu. Take heed,
chela, lest he run away when he smells his Hills again ... Hai! Do
not tilt the rice-bag upside down ... Bless the household, Holy One,
and forgive thy servant her stupidities.'

She wiped her red old eyes on a corner of her veil, and clucked
throatily.

'Women talk,' said the lama at last, 'but that is a woman's
infirmity. I gave her a charm. She is upon the Wheel and wholly
given over to the shows of this life, but none the less, chela, she
is virtuous, kindly, hospitable - of a whole and zealous heart. Who
shall say she does not acquire merit?'

'Not I, Holy One,' said Kim, reslinging the bountiful provision on
his shoulders. 'In my mind - behind my eyes - I have tried to
picture such an one altogether freed from the Wheel - desiring
nothing, causing nothing - a nun, as it were'

'And, O imp?' The lama almost laughed aloud.

'I cannot make the picture.'

'Nor I. But there are many, many millions of lives before her. She
will get wisdom a little, it may be, in each one.'

'And will she forget how to make stews with saffron upon that road?'

'Thy mind is set on things unworthy. But she has skill. I am
refreshed all over. When we reach the lower hills I shall be yet
stronger. The hakim spoke truly to me this morn when he said a
breath from the snows blows away twenty years from the life of a
man. We will go up into the Hills - the high hills - up to the
sound of snow-waters and the sound of the trees - for a little
while. The hakim said that at any time we may return to the Plains,
for we do no more than skirt the pleasant places. The hakim is full
of learning; but he is in no way proud. I spoke to him - when thou
wast talking to the Sahiba - of a certain dizziness that lays hold
upon the back of my neck in the night, and he said it rose from
excessive heat - to be cured by cool air. Upon consideration, I
marvelled that I had not thought of such a simple remedy.'

'Didst thou tell him of thy Search?' said Kim, a little jealously.
He preferred to sway the lama by his own speech - not through the
wiles of Hurree Babu.

'Assuredly. I told him of my dream, and of the manner by which I had
acquired merit by causing thee to be taught wisdom.'

'Thou didst not say I was a Sahib?'

'What need? I have told thee many times we be but two souls seeking
escape. He said - and he is just herein - that the River of Healing
will break forth even as I dreamed - at my feet, if need be. Having
found the Way, seest thou, that shall free me from the Wheel, need I
trouble to find a way about the mere fields of earth - which are
illusion? That were senseless. I have my dreams, night upon night
repeated; I have Fataka; and I have thee, Friend of all the World.
It was written in thy horoscope that a Red Bull on a green field - I
have not forgotten - should bring thee to honour. Who but I saw that
prophecy accomplished? Indeed, I was the instrument. Thou shalt find
me my River, being in return the instrument. The Search is sure!'

He set his ivory-yellow face, serene and untroubled, towards the
beckoning Hills; his shadow shouldering far before him in the dust.

Chapter 13

Who hath desired the Sea - the immense and contemptuous surges?
The shudder, the stumble, the swerve ere the star-stabbing bowsprit
merges -
The orderly clouds of the Trades and the ridged roaring
sapphire thereunder -
Unheralded cliff-lurking flaws and the head-sails' low-volleying
thunder?
His Sea in no wonder the same - his Sea and the same in each wonder
-
His Sea that his being fulfils?
So and no otherwise - so and no otherwise hill-men desire their
hills!

The Sea and the Hills.

'Who goes to the hills goes to his mother.'

They had crossed the Siwaliks and the half-tropical Doon, left
Mussoorie behind them, and headed north along the narrow hill-roads.
Day after day they struck deeper into the huddled mountains, and day
after day Kim watched the lama return to a man's strength. Among the
terraces of the Doon he had leaned on the boy's shoulder, ready to
profit by wayside halts. Under the great ramp to Mussoorie he drew
himself together as an old hunter faces a well-remembered bank, and
where he should have sunk exhausted swung his long draperies about
him, drew a deep double-lungful of the diamond air, and walked as
only a hillman can. Kim, plains-bred and plains-fed, sweated and
panted astonished. 'This is my country,' said the lama. 'Beside
Such-zen, this is flatter than a rice-field'; and with steady,
driving strokes from the loins he strode upwards. But it was on the
steep downhill marches, three thousand feet in three hours, that he
went utterly away from Kim, whose back ached with holding back, and
whose big toe was nigh cut off by his grass sandal-string. Through
the speckled shadow of the great deodar-forests; through oak
feathered and plumed with ferns; birch, ilex, rhododendron, and
pine, out on to the bare hillsides' slippery sunburnt grass, and
back into the woodlands' coolth again, till oak gave way to bamboo
and palm of the valley, the lama swung untiring.

Glancing back in the twilight at the huge ridges behind him and the
faint, thin line of the road whereby they had come, he would lay
out, with a hillman's generous breadth of vision, fresh marches for
the morrow; or, halting in the neck of some uplifted pass that gave
on Spiti and Kulu, would stretch out his hands yearningly towards
the high snows of the horizon. In the dawns they flared windy-red
above stark blue, as Kedar- nath and Badrinath - kings of that
wilderness - took the first sunlight. All day long they lay like
molten silver under the sun, and at evening put on their jewels
again. At first they breathed temperately upon the travellers, winds
good to meet when one crawled over some gigantic hog's-back; but in
a few days, at a height of nine or ten thousand feet, those breezes
bit; and Kim kindly allowed a village of hillmen to acquire merit by
giving him a rough blanket-coat. The lama was mildly surprised that
anyone should object to the knife-edged breezes which had cut the
years off his shoulders.

'These are but the lower hills, chela. There is no cold till we come
to the true Hills.'

'Air and water are good, and the people are devout enough, but the
food is very bad,' Kim growled; 'and we walk as though we were mad -
or English. It freezes at night, too.'

'A little, maybe; but only enough to make old bones rejoice in the
sun. We must not always delight in soft beds and rich food.'

'We might at least keep to the road.'

Kim had all a plainsman's affection for the well-trodden track, not
six feet wide, that snaked among the mountains; but the lama, being
Tibetan, could not refrain from short cuts over spurs and the rims
of gravel-strewn slopes. As he explained to his limping disciple, a
man bred among mountains can prophesy the course of a mountain-road,
and though low-lying clouds might be a hindrance to a short-cutting
stranger, they made no earthly difference to a thoughtful man. Thus,
after long hours of what would be reckoned very fair mountaineering
in civilized countries, they would pant over a saddle-back, sidle
past a few landslips, and drop through forest at an angle of forty-
five onto the road again. Along their track lay the villages of the
hillfolk - mud and earth huts, timbers now and then rudely carved
with an axe - clinging like swallows' nests against the steeps,
huddled on tiny flats half-way down a three-thousand-foot glissade;
jammed into a corner between cliffs that funnelled and focused every
wandering blast; or, for the sake of summer pasture, cowering down
on a neck that in winter would be ten feet deep in snow. And the
people - the sallow, greasy, duffle- clad people, with short bare
legs and faces almost Esquimaux - would flock out and adore. The
Plains - kindly and gentle - had treated the lama as a holy man
among holy men. But the Hills worshipped him as one in the
confidence of all their devils. Theirs was an almost obliterated
Buddhism, overlaid with a nature-worship fantastic as their own
landscapes, elaborate as the terracing of their tiny fields; but
they recognized the big hat, the clicking rosary, and the rare
Chinese texts for great authority; and they respected the man
beneath the hat.

'We saw thee come down over the black Breasts of Eua,' said a Betah
who gave them cheese, sour milk, and stone-hard bread one evening.
'We do not use that often - except when calving cows stray in
summer. There is a sudden wind among those stones that casts men
down on the stillest day. But what should such folk care for the
Devil of Eua!'

Then did Kim, aching in every fibre, dizzy with looking down,
footsore with cramping desperate toes into inadequate crannies, take
joy in the day's march - such joy as a boy of St Xavier's who had
won the quarter-mile on the flat might take in the praises of his
friends. The hills sweated the ghi and sugar suet off his bones;
the dry air, taken sobbingly at the head of cruel passes, firmed and
built out his upper ribs; and the tilted levels put new hard muscles
into calf and thigh.

They meditated often on the Wheel of Life - the more so since, as
the lama said, they were freed from its visible temptations. Except
the grey eagle and an occasional far-seen bear grubbing and rooting
on the hillside; a vision of a furious painted leopard met at dawn
in a still valley devouring a goat; and now and again a bright-
coloured bird, they were alone with the winds and the grass singing
under the wind. The women of the smoky huts over whose roofs the
two walked as they descended the mountains, were unlovely and
unclean, wives of many husbands, and afflicted with goitre. The men
were woodcutters when they were not farmers - meek, and of an
incredible simplicity. But that suitable discourse might not fail,
Fate sent them, overtaking and overtaken upon the road, the
courteous Dacca physician, who paid for his food in ointments good
for goitre and counsels that restore peace between men and women. He
seemed to know these hills as well as he knew the hill dialects, and
gave the lama the lie of the land towards Ladakh and Tibet. He said
they could return to the Plains at any moment. Meantime, for such as
loved mountains, yonder road might amuse. This was not all revealed
in a breath, but at evening encounters on the stone threshing-
floors, when, patients disposed of, the doctor would smoke and the
lama snuff, while Kim watched the wee cows grazing on the housetops,
or threw his soul after his eyes across the deep blue gulfs between
range and range. And there were talks apart in the dark woods, when
the doctor would seek herbs, and Kim, as budding physician, must
accompany him.

'You see, Mister O'Hara, I do not know what the deuce-an'- all I
shall do when I find our sporting friends; but if you will kindly
keep within sight of my umbrella, which is fine fixed point for
cadastral survey, I shall feel much better.'

Kim looked out across the jungle of peaks. 'This is not my country,
hakim. Easier, I think, to find one louse in a bear-skin.'

'Oah, thatt is my strong points. There is no hurry for Hurree. They
were at Leh not so long ago. They said they had come down from the
Karakorum with their heads and horns and all. I am onlee afraid they
will have sent back all their letters and compromising things from
Leh into Russian territoree. Of course they will walk away as far to
the East as possible - just to show that they were never among the
Western States. You do not know the Hills?' He scratched with a twig
on the earth. 'Look! They should have come in by Srinagar or
Abbottabad. Thatt is their short road - down the river by Bunji and
Astor. But they have made mischief in the West. So' - he drew a
furrow from left to right - 'they march and they march away East to
Leh (ah! it is cold there), and down the Indus to Hanle (I know that
road), and then down, you see, to Bushahr and Chini valley. That is
ascertained by process of elimination, and also by asking questions
from people that I cure so well. Our friends have been a long time
playing about and producing impressions. So they are well known from
far off. You will see me catch them somewhere in Chini valley.
Please keep your eye on the umbrella.'

It nodded like a wind-blown harebell down the valleys and round the
mountain sides, and in due time the lama and Kim, who steered by
compass, would overhaul it, vending ointments and powders at
eventide. 'We came by such and such a way!' The lama would throw a
careless finger backward at the ridges, and the umbrella would
expend itself in compliments.

They crossed a snowy pass in cold moonlight, when the lama, mildly
chaffing Kim, went through up to his knees, like a Bactrian camel -
the snow-bred, shag-haired sort that came into the Kashmir Serai.
They dipped across beds of light snow and snow-powdered shale, where
they took refuge from a gale in a camp of Tibetans hurrying down
tiny sheep, each laden with a bag of borax. They came out upon
grassy shoulders still snow-speckled, and through forest, to grass
anew. For all their marchings, Kedarnath and Badrinath were not
impressed; and it was only after days of travel that Kim, uplifted
upon some insignificant ten-thousand-foot hummock, could see that a
shoulder-knot or horn of the two great lords had - ever so slightly
- changed outline.

At last they entered a world within a world - a valley of leagues
where the high hills were fashioned of a mere rubble and refuse from
off the knees of the mountains. Here one day's march carried them no
farther, it seemed, than a dreamer's clogged pace bears him in a
nightmare. They skirted a shoulder painfully for hours, and,
behold, it was but an outlying boss in an outlying buttress of the
main pile! A rounded meadow revealed itself, when they had reached
it, for a vast tableland running far into the valley. Three days
later, it was a dim fold in the earth to southward.

'Surely the Gods live here!' said Kim, beaten down by the silence
and the appalling sweep and dispersal of the cloud-shadows after
rain. 'This is no place for men!'

'Long and long ago,' said the lama, as to himself, 'it was asked of
the Lord whether the world were everlasting. o this the Excellent
One returned no answer ... When I was in Ceylon, a wise Seeker
confirmed that from the gospel which is written in Pali. Certainly,
since we know the way to Freedom, the question were unprofitable,
but - look, and know illusion, chela! These- are the true Hills!
They are like my hills by Suchzen. Never were such hills!'

Above them, still enormously above them, earth towered away towards
the snow-line, where from east to west across hundreds of miles,
ruled as with a ruler, the last of the bold birches stopped. Above
that, in scarps and blocks upheaved, the rocks strove to fight their
heads above the white smother. Above these again, changeless since
the world's beginning, but changing to every mood of sun and cloud,
lay out the eternal snow. They could see blots and blurs on its face
where storm and wandering wullie-wa got up to dance. Below them, as
they stood, the forest slid away in a sheet of blue-green for mile
upon mile; below the forest was a village in its sprinkle of
terraced fields and steep grazing-grounds. Below the village they
knew, though a thunderstorm worried and growled there for the
moment, a pitch of twelve or fifteen hundred feet gave to the moist
valley where the streams gather that are the mothers of young
Sutluj.

As usual, the lama had led Kim by cow-track and by-road, far from
the main route along which Hurree Babu, that 'fearful man', had
bucketed three days before through a storm to which nine Englishmen
out of ten would have given full right of way. Hurree was no game-
shot - the snick of a trigger made him change colour - but, as he
himself would have said, he was 'fairly effeecient stalker', and he
had raked the huge valley with a pair of cheap binoculars to some
purpose. Moreover, the white of worn canvas tents against green
carries far. Hurree Babu had seen all he wanted to see when he sat
on the threshing-floor of Ziglaur, twenty miles away as the eagle
flies, and forty by road - that is to say, two small dots which one
day were just below the snow-line, and the next had moved downward
perhaps six inches on the hillside. Once cleaned out and set to the
work, his fat bare legs could cover a surprising amount of ground,
and this was the reason why, while Kim and the lama lay in a leaky
hut at Ziglaur till the storm should be over-past, an oily, wet, but
always smiling Bengali, talking the best of English with the vilest
of phrases, was ingratiating himself with two sodden and rather
rheumatic foreigners. He had arrived, revolving many wild schemes,
on the heels of a thunderstorm which had split a pine over against
their camp, and so convinced a dozen or two forcibly impressed
baggage-coolies the day was inauspicious for farther travel that
with one accord they had thrown down their loads and jibbed. They
were subjects of a Hill Rajah who farmed out their services, as is
the custom, for his private gain; and, to add to their personal
distresses, the strange Sahibs had already threatened them with
rifles. The most of them knew rifles and Sahibs of old: they were
trackers and shikarris of the Northern valleys, keen after bear and
wild goat; but they had never been thus treated in their lives. So
the forest took them to her bosom, and, for all oaths and clamour,
refused to restore. There was no need to feign madness or - the Babu
had thought of another means of securing a welcome. He wrung out his
wet clothes, slipped on his patent-leather shoes, opened the blue-
and-white umbrella, and with mincing gait and a heart beating
against his tonsils appeared as 'agent for His Royal Highness, the
Rajah of Rampur, gentlemen. What can I do for you, please?'

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