Kim

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'They are there - with nothing; and, by Jove, it is cold! I am here
with all their things. Oh, they will be angry! I am sorry for Hurree
Babu.'

Kim might have saved his pity, for though at that moment the Bengali
suffered acutely in the flesh, his soul was puffed and lofty. A mile
down the hill, on the edge of the pine-forest, two half-frozen men -
one powerfully sick at intervals - were varying mutual
recriminations with the most poignant abuse of the Babu, who seemed
distraught with terror. They demanded a plan of action. He
explained that they were very lucky to be alive; that their coolies,
if not then stalking them, had passed beyond recall; that the Rajah,
his master, was ninety miles away, and, so far from lending them
money and a retinue for the Simla journey, would surely cast them
into prison if he heard that they had hit a priest. He enlarged on
this sin and its consequences till they bade him change the subject.
Their one hope, said he, was unostentatious flight from village to
village till they reached civilization; and, for the hundredth time
dissolved in tears, he demanded of the high stars why the Sahibs
'had beaten holy man'.

Ten steps would have taken Hurree into the creaking gloom utterly
beyond their reach - to the shelter and food of the nearest village,
where glib-tongued doctors were scarce. But he preferred to endure
cold, belly-pinch, bad words, and occasional blows in the company of
his honoured employers. Crouched against a tree-trunk, he sniffed
dolefully.

'And have you thought,' said the uninjured man hotly, 'what sort of
spectacle we shall present wandering through these hills among these
aborigines?'

Hurree Babu had thought of little else for some hours, but the
remark was not to his address.

'We cannot wander! I can hardly walk,' groaned Kim's victim.

'Perhaps the holy man will be merciful in loving-kindness, sar,
otherwise -'

'I promise myself a peculiar pleasure in emptying my revolver into
that young bonze when next we meet,' was the unchristian answer.

'Revolvers! Vengeance! Bonzes!' Hurree crouched lower. The war was
breaking out afresh. 'Have you no consideration for our loss? The
baggage! The baggage!' He could hear the speaker literally dancing
on the grass. 'Everything we bore! Everything we have secured! Our
gains! Eight months' work! Do you know what that means? "Decidedly
it is we who can deal with Orientals!" Oh, you have done well.'

They fell to it in several tongues, and Hurree smiled. Kim was with
the kiltas, and in the kiltas lay eight months of good diplomacy.
There was no means of communicating with the boy, but he could be
trusted. For the rest, Hurree could so stage-manage the journey
through the hills that Hilas, Bunar, and four hundred miles of hill-
roads should tell the tale for a generation. Men who cannot control
their own coolies are little respected in the Hills, and the hillman
has a very keen sense of humour.

'If I had done it myself,' thought Hurree, 'it would not have been
better; and, by Jove, now I think of it, of course I arranged it
myself. How quick I have been! Just when I ran downhill I thought
it! Thee outrage was accidental, but onlee me could have worked it -
ah - for all it was dam'-well worth. Consider the moral effect upon
these ignorant peoples! No treaties - no papers - no written
documents at all - and me to interpret for them. How I shall laugh
with the Colonel! I wish I had their papers also: but you cannot
occupy two places in space simultaneously. Thatt is axiomatic.'

Chapter 14

My brother kneels (so saith Kabir)
To stone and brass in heathen wise,
But in my brother's voice I hear
My own unanswered agonies.
His God is as his Fates assign -
His prayer is all the world's - and mine.

The Prayer.

At moonrise the cautious coolies got under way. The lama, refreshed
by his sleep and the spirit, needed no more than Kim's shoulder to
bear him along - a silent, swift-striding man. They held the shale-
sprinkled grass for an hour, swept round the shoulder of an immortal
cliff, and climbed into a new country entirely blocked off from all
sight of Chini valley. A huge pasture-ground ran up fan-shaped to
the living snow. At its base was perhaps half an acre of flat land,
on which stood a few soil and timber huts. Behind them - for, hill-
fashion, they were perched on the edge of all things - the ground
fell sheer two thousand feet to Shamlegh-midden, where never yet man
has set foot.

The men made no motion to divide the plunder till they had seen the
lama bedded down in the best room of the place, with Kim shampooing
his feet, Mohammedan-fashion.

'We will send food, ' said the Ao-chung man, 'and the red- topped
kilta. By dawn there will be none to give evidence, one way or the
other. If anything is not needed in the kilta - see here!'

He pointed through the window - opening into space that was filled
with moonlight reflected from the snow - and threw out an empty
whisky-bottle.

'No need to listen for the fall. This is the world's end,' he said,
and went out. The lama looked forth, a hand on either sill, with
eyes that shone like yellow opals. From the enormous pit before him
white peaks lifted themselves yearning to the moonlight. The rest
was as the darkness of interstellar space.

'These,' he said slowly, 'are indeed my Hills. Thus should a man
abide, perched above the world, separated from delights, considering
vast matters.'

'Yes; if he has a chela to prepare tea for him, and to fold a
blanket for his head, and to chase out calving cows.'

A smoky lamp burned in a niche, but the full moonlight beat it down;
and by the mixed light, stooping above the food-bag and cups, Kim
moved like a tall ghost.

'Ai! But now I have let the blood cool, my head still beats and
drums, and there is a cord round the back of my neck.'

'No wonder. It was a strong blow. May he who dealt it -'

'But for my own passions there would have been no evil.'

'What evil? Thou hast saved the Sahibs from the death they deserved
a hundred times.'

'The lesson is not well learnt, chela.' The lama came to rest on a
folded blanket, as Kim went forward with his evening routine. 'The
blow was but a shadow upon a shadow. Evil in itself - my legs weary
apace these latter days! - it met evil in me anger, rage, and a lust
to return evil. These wrought in my blood, woke tumult in my
stomach, and dazzled my ears.' Here he drank scalding block-tea
ceremonially, taking the hot cup from Kim's hand. 'Had I been
passionless, the evil blow would have done only bodily evil - a
scar, or a bruise - which is illusion. But my mind was not
abstracted, for rushed in straightway a lust to let the Spiti men
kill. In fighting that lust, my soul was torn and wrenched beyond a
thousand blows. Not till I had repeated the Blessings' (he meant the
Buddhist Beatitudes) 'did I achieve calm. But the evil planted in
me by that moment's carelessness works out to its end. Just is the
Wheel, swerving not a hair! Learn the lesson, chela.'

'It is too high for me,' Kim muttered. 'I am still all shaken. I am
glad I hurt the man.'

'I felt that, sleeping upon thy knees, in the wood below. It
disquieted me in my dreams - the evil in thy soul working through to
mine. Yet on the other hand' - he loosed his rosary -'I have
acquired merit by saving two lives - the lives of those that wronged
me. Now I must see into the Cause of Things.The boat of my soul
staggers.'

'Sleep, and be strong. That is wisest.'

'I meditate. There is a need greater than thou knowest.'

Till the dawn, hour after hour, as the moonlight paled on the high
peaks, and that which had been belted blackness on the sides of the
far hills showed as tender green forest, the lama stared fixedly at
the wall. From time to time he groaned. Outside the barred door,
where discomfited kine came to ask for their old stable, Shamlegh
and the coolies gave itself up to plunder and riotous living. The
Ao-chung man was their leader, and once they had opened the Sahibs'
tinned foods and found that they were very good they dared not turn
back. Shamlegh kitchen-midden took the dunnage.

When Kim, after a night of bad dreams, stole forth to brush his
teeth in the morning chill, a fair-coloured woman with turquoise-
studded headgear drew him aside.

'The others have gone. They left thee this kilta as the promise was.
I do not love Sahibs, but thou wilt make us a charm in return for
it. We do not wish little Shamlegh to get a bad name on account of
the - accident. I am the Woman of Shamlegh.' She looked him over
with bold, bright eyes, unlike the usual furtive glance of
hillwomen.

'Assuredly. But it must be done in secret.'

She raised the heavy kilta like a toy and slung it into her own hut.

'Out and bar the door! Let none come near till it is finished,'
said Kim.

'But afterwards - we may talk?'

Kim tilted the kilta on the floor - a cascade of Survey-instruments,
books, diaries, letters, maps, and queerly scented native
correspondence. At the very bottom was an embroidered bag covering a
sealed, gilded, and illuminated document such as one King sends to
another. Kim caught his breath with delight,and reviewed the
situation from a Sahib's point of view.

'The books I do not want. Besides, they are logarithms - Survey, I
suppose.' He laid them aside. 'The letters I do not understand, but
Colonel Creighton will. They must all be kept. The maps - they draw
better maps than me - of course. All the native letters - oho! - and
particularly the murasla.' He sniffed the embroidered bag. 'That
must be from Hilas or Bunar, and Hurree Babu spoke truth. By Jove!
It is a fine haul. I wish Hurree could know . . . The rest must go
out of the window.' He fingered a superb prismatic compass and the
shiny top of a theodolite. But after all, a Sahib cannot very well
steal, and the things might be inconvenient evidence later. He
sorted out every scrap of manuscript, every map, and the native
letters. They made one softish slab. The three locked ferril-backed
books, with five worn pocket-books, he put aside.

'The letters and the murasla I must carry inside my coat and under
my belt, and the hand-written books I must put into the food-bag. It
will be very heavy. No. I do not think there is anything more. If
there is, the coolies have thrown it down the khud, so thatt is all
right. Now you go too.' He repacked the kilta with all he meant to
lose, and hove it up on to the windowsill. A thousand feet below lay
a long, lazy, round-shouldered bank of mist, as yet untouched by the
morning sun. A thousand feet below that was a hundred-year-old pine-
forest. He could see the green tops looking like a bed of moss when
a wind-eddy thinned the cloud.

'No! I don't think any one will go after you!'

The wheeling basket vomited its contents as it dropped. The
theodolite hit a jutting cliff-ledge and exploded like a shell; the
books, inkstands, paint-boxes, compasses, and rulers showed for a
few seconds like a swarm of bees. Then they vanished; and, though
Kim, hanging half out of the window, strained his young ears, never
a sound came up from the gulf.

'Five hundred - a thousand rupees could not buy them,' he thought
sorrowfully. 'It was verree wasteful, but I have all their other
stuff - everything they did - I hope. Now how the deuce am I to tell
Hurree Babu, and whatt the deuce am I to do? And my old man is sick.
I must tie up the letters in oilskin. That is something to do first
- else they will get all sweated ... And I am all alone!' He bound
them into a neat packet, swedging down the stiff, sticky oilskin at
the comers, for his roving life had made him as methodical as an old
hunter in matters of the road. Then with double care he packed away
the books at the bottom of the food-bag.

The woman rapped at the door.

'But thou hast made no charm,' she said, looking about.

'There is no need.' Kim had completely overlooked the necessity for
a little patter-talk. The woman laughed at his confusion
irreverently.

'None - for thee. Thou canst cast a spell by the mere winking of an
eye. But think of us poor people when thou art gone. They were all
too drunk last night to hear a woman. Thou art not drunk?'

'I am a priest.' Kim had recovered himself, and, the woman being
aught but unlovely, thought best to stand on his office.

'I warned them that the Sahibs will be angry and will make an
inquisition and a report to the Rajah. There is also the Babu with
them. Clerks have long tongues.'

'Is that all thy trouble?' The plan rose fully formed in Kim's mind,
and he smiled ravishingly.

'Not all,' quoth the woman, putting out a hard brown hand all
covered with turquoises set in silver.

'I can finish that in a breath,' he went on quickly. 'The Babu is
the very hakim (thou hast heard of him?) who was wandering among the
hills by Ziglaur. I know him.'

'He will tell for the sake of a reward. Sahibs cannot distinguish
one hillman from another, but Babus have eyes for men - and women.'

'Carry a word to him from me.'

'There is nothing I would not do for thee.'

He accepted the compliment calmly, as men must in lands where women
make the love, tore a leaf from a note-book, and with a patent
indelible pencil wrote in gross Shikast - the script that bad little
boys use when they write dirt on walls: 'I have everything that they
have written: their pictures of the country, and many letters.
Especially the murasla. Tell me what to do. I am at Shamlegh-under-
the-Snow. The old man is sick.'

"Take this to him. It will altogether shut his mouth. He cannot have
gone far.'

'Indeed no. They are still in the forest across the spur. Our
children went to watch them when the light came, and have cried the
news as they moved.'

Kim looked his astonishment; but from the edge of the sheep-pasture
floated a shrill, kite-like trill. A child tending cattle had picked
it up from a brother or sister on the far side of the slope that
commanded Chini valley,

'My husbands are also out there gathering wood.' She drew a handful
of walnuts from her bosom, split one neatly, and began to eat. Kim
affected blank ignorance.

'Dost thou not know the meaning of the walnut -- priest?' she said
coyly, and handed him the half-shells.

'Well thought of.' He slipped the piece of paper between them
quickly. 'Hast thou a little wax to close them on this letter?'

The woman sighed aloud, and Kim relented.

'There is no payment till service has been rendered. Carry this to
the Babu, and say it was sent by the Son of the Charm.'

'Al! Truly! Truly! By a magician - who is like a Sahib.'

'Nay, a Son of the Charm: and ask if there be any answer.'

'But if he offer a rudeness? I - I am afraid.'

Kim laughed. 'He is, I have no doubt, very tired and very hungry.
The Hills make cold bedfellows. Hai, my' - it was on the tip of his
tongue to say Mother, but he turned it to Sister -'thou art a wise
and witty woman. By this time all the villages know what has
befallen the Sahibs - eh?'

'True. News was at Ziglaur by midnight, and by tomorrow should be at
Kotgarh. The villages are both afraid and angry.'

'No need. Tell the villages to feed the Sahibs and pass them on, in
peace. We must get them quietly away from our valleys. To steal is
one thing - to kill another. The Babu will understand, and there
will be no after-complaints. Be swift. I must tend my master when he
wakes.'

'So be it. After service - thou hast said? - comes the reward. I am
the Woman of Shamlegh, and I hold from the Rajah. I am no common
bearer of babes. Shamlegh is thine: hoof and horn and hide, milk and
butter. Take or leave.'

She turned resolutely uphill, her silver necklaces clicking on her
broad breast, to meet the morning sun fifteen hundred feet above
them. This time Kim thought in the vernacular as he waxed down the
oilskin edges of the packets.

'How can a man follow the Way or the Great Game when he is so-always
pestered by women? There was that girl at Akrola of the Ford; and
there was the scullion's wife behind the dovecot - not counting the
others - and now comes this one! When I was a child it was well
enough, but now I am a man and they will not regard me as a man.
Walnuts, indeed! Ho! ho! It is almonds in the Plains!'

He went out to levy on the village - not with a begging-bowl, which
might do for down-country, but in the manner of a prince. Shamlegh's
summer population is only three families - four women and eight or
nine men. They were all full of tinned meats and mixed drinks, from
ammoniated quinine to white vodka, for they had taken their full
share in the overnight loot. The neat Continental tents had been cut
up and shared long ago, and there were patent aluminium saucepans
abroad.

But they considered the lama's presence a perfect safeguard against
all consequences, and impenitently brought Kim of their best - even
to a drink of chang - the barley-beer that comes from Ladakh-way.
Then they thawed out in the sun, and sat with their legs hanging
over infinite abysses, chattering, laughing, and smoking. They
judged India and its Government solely from their experience of
wandering Sahibs who had employed them or their friends as
shikarris. Kim heard tales of shots missed upon ibex, serow, or
markhor, by Sahibs twenty years in their graves - every detail
lighted from behind like twigs on tree-tops seen against lightning.
They told him of their little diseases, and, more important, the
diseases of their tiny, sure-footed cattle; of trips as far as
Kotgarh, where the strange missionaries live, and beyond even to
marvellous Simla, where the streets are paved with silver, and
anyone, look you, can get service with the Sahibs, who ride about in
two-wheeled carts and spend money with a spade. Presently, grave
and aloof, walking very heavily, the lama joined himself to the
chatter under the eaves, and they gave him great room. The thin air
refreshed him, and he sat on the edge of precipices with the best of
them, and, when talk languished, flung pebbles into the void. Thirty
miles away, as the eagle flies, lay the next range, seamed and
channelled and pitted with little patches of brush - forests, each a
day's dark march. Behind the village, Shamlegh hill itself cut off
all view to southward. It was like sitting in a swallow's nest
under the eaves of the roof of the world.

>From time to time the lama stretched out his hand, and with a little
low-voiced prompting would point out the road to Spiti and north
across the Parungla.

'Beyond, where the hills lie thickest, lies De-ch'en' (he meant
Han-le'), 'the great Monastery. s'Tag-stan-ras-ch'en built it,and of
him there runs this tale.' Whereupon he told it: a fantastic piled
narrative of bewitchment and miracles that set Shamlegh a-gasping.
Turning west a little, he speered for the green hills of Kulu, and
sought Kailung under the glaciers.'For thither came I in the old,
old days. From Leh I came, over the Baralachi.'

'Yes, yes; we know it,' said the far-faring people of Shamlegh.

'And I slept two nights with the priests of Kailung. These are the
Hills of my delight! Shadows blessed above all other shadows! There
my eyes opened on this world; there my eyes were opened to this
world; there I found Enlightenment; and there I girt my loins for my
Search. Out of the Hills I came - the high Hills and the strong
winds. Oh, just is the Wheel!' He blessed them in detail - the great
glaciers, the naked rocks, the piled moraines and tumbled shale; dry
upland, hidden salt-lake, age-old timber and fruitful water-shot
valley one after the other, as a dying man blesses his folk; and Kim
marvelled at his passion.

'Yes - yes. There is no place like our Hills,' said the people of
Shamlegh. And they fell to wondering how a man could live in the hot
terrible Plains where the cattle run as big as elephants, unfit to
plough on a hillside; where village touches village, they had heard,
for a hundred miles; where folk went about stealing in gangs, and
what the robbers spared the Police carried utterly away.

So the still forenoon wore through, and at the end of it Kim's
messenger dropped from the steep pasture as unbreathed as when she
had set out.

'I sent a word to the hakim,' Kim explained, while she made
reverence.

'He joined himself to the idolaters? Nay, I remember he did a
healing upon one of them. He has acquired merit, though the healed
employed his strength for evil. Just is the Wheel! What of the
hakim?'

'I feared that thou hadst been bruised and - and I knew he was
wise.' Kim took the waxed walnut-shell and read in English on the
back of his note: Your favour received. Cannot get away from present
company at present, but shall take them into Simla. After which,
hope to rejoin you. Inexpedient to follow angry gentlemen. Return by
same road you came, and will overtake. Highly gratified about
correspondence due to my forethought. 'He says, Holy One, that he
will escape from the idolaters, and will return to us. Shall we wait
awhile at Shamlegh, then?'

The lama looked long and lovingly upon the hills and shook his head.

'That may not be, chela. From my bones outward I do desire it, but
it is forbidden. I have seen the Cause of Things.'

'Why? When the Hills give thee back thy strength day by day?
Remember we were weak and fainting down below there in the Doon.'

'I became strong to do evil and to forget. A brawler and a
swashbuckler upon the hillsides was I.' Kim bit back a smile. 'Just
and perfect is the Wheel, swerving not a hair. When I was a man - a
long time ago - I did pilgrimage to Guru Ch'wan among the poplars'
(he pointed Bhotanwards), 'where they keep the Sacred Horse.'

'Quiet, be quiet!' said Shamlegh, all arow. 'He speaks of Jam-lin-
nin-k'or, the Horse That Can Go Round The World In a Day.'

'I speak to my chela only,' said the lama, in gentle reproof, and
they scattered like frost on south eaves of a morning. 'I did not
seek truth in those days, but the talk of doctrine. All illusion! I
drank the beer and ate the bread of Guru Ch'wan. Next day one said:
"We go out to fight Sangor Gutok down the valley to discover" (mark
again how Lust is tied to Anger!) "which Abbot shall bear rule in
the valley and take the profit of the prayers they print at Sangor
Gutok." I went, and we fought a day.'

'But how, Holy One?'

'With our long pencases as I could have shown . . . I say, we
fought under the poplars, both Abbots and all the monks, and one
laid open my forehead to the bone. See!' He tilted back his cap and
showed a puckered silvery scar. 'Just and perfect is the Wheel!
Yesterday the scar itched, and after fifty years I recalled how it
was dealt and the face of him who dealt it; dwelling a little in
illusion. Followed that which thou didst see - strife and stupidity.
Just is the Wheel! The idolater's blow fell upon the scar. Then I
was shaken in my soul: my soul was darkened, and the boat of my soul
rocked upon the waters of illusion. Not till I came to Shamlegh
could I meditate upon the Cause of Things, or trace the running
grass-roots of Evil. I strove all the long night.'

'But', Holy One, thou art innocent of all evil. May I be thy
sacrifice!'

Kim was genuinely distressed at the old man's sorrow, and Mahbub
Ali's phrase slipped out unawares.

'In the dawn,' the lama went on more gravely, ready rosary clicking
between the slow sentences, 'came enlightenment. It is here ... I am
an old man . . . hill-bred, hill-fed, never to sit down among my
Hills. Three years I travelled through Hind, but - can earth be
stronger than Mother Earth? My stupid body yearned to the Hills and
the snows of the Hills, from below there. I said, and it is true,
my Search is sure. So, at the Kulu woman's house I turned hillward,
over-persuaded by myself. There is no blame to the hakim. He -
following Desire - foretold that the Hills would make me strong.
They strengthened me to do evil, to forget my Search. I delighted in
life and the lust of life. I desired strong slopes to climb. I cast
about to find them. I measured the strength of my body, which is
evil, against the high Hills, I made a mock of thee when thy breath
came short under Jamnotri. I jested when thou wouldst not face the
snow of the pass.'

'But what harm? I was afraid. It was just. I am not a hillman; and I
loved thee for thy new strength.'

'More than once I remember' - he rested his cheek dolefully on his
hand - 'I sought thy praise and the hakim's for the mere strength of
my legs. Thus evil followed evil till the cup was full. Just is the
Wheel! All Hind for three years did me all honour. From the Fountain
of Wisdom in the Wonder House to' - he smiled -'a little child
playing by a big gun - the world prepared my road. And why?'

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