Kim Rudyard Kipling (web ebook reader .TXT) 📖

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 Hilás, Bunár, 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.”

XIV

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 black-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