Books: Kim

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24

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 Jataka; 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?'

The gentlemen were delighted. One was visibly French, the other
Russian, but they spoke English not much inferior to the Babu's.
They begged his kind offices. Their native servants had gone sick at
Leh. They had hurried on because they were anxious to bring the
spoils of the chase to Simla ere the skins grew moth-eaten. They
bore a general letter of introduction (the Babu salaamed to it
orientally) to all Government officials. No, they had not met any
other shooting-parties en route. They did for themselves. They had
plenty of supplies. They only wished to push on as soon as might be.
At this he waylaid a cowering hillman among the trees, and after
three minutes' talk and a little silver (one cannot be economical
upon State service, though Hurree's heart bled at the waste) the
eleven coolies and the three hangers-on reappeared. At least the
Babu would be a witness to their oppression.

'My royal master, he will be much annoyed, but these people are
onlee common people and grossly ignorant. If your honours will
kindly overlook unfortunate affair, I shall be much pleased. In a
little while rain will stop and we can then proceed. You have been
shooting, eh? That is fine performance!'

He skipped nimbly from one kilta to the next, making pretence to
adjust each conical basket. The Englishman is not, as a rule,
familiar with the Asiatic, but he would not strike across the wrist
a kindly Babu who had accidentally upset a kilta with a red oilskin
top. On the other hand, he would not press drink upon a Babu were
he never so friendly, nor would he invite him to meat. The
strangers did all these things, and asked many questions - about
women mostly - to which Hurree returned gay and unstudied answers.
They gave him a glass of whitish fluid like to gin, and then more;
and in a little time his gravity departed from him. He became
thickly treasonous, and spoke in terms of sweeping indecency of a
Government which had forced upon him a white man's education and
neglected to supply him with a white man's salary. He babbled tales
of oppression and wrong till the tears ran down his cheeks for the
miseries of his land. Then he staggered off, singing love-songs of
Lower Bengal, and collapsed upon a wet tree-trunk. Never was so
unfortunate a product of English rule in India more unhappily thrust
upon aliens.

'They are all just of that pattern,' said one sportsman to the other
in French. 'When we get into India proper thou wilt see. I should
like to visit his Rajah. One might speak the good word there. It is
possible that he has heard of us and wishes to signify his good-
will.'

'We have not time. We must get into Simla as soon as may be,' his
companion replied. 'For my own part, I wish our reports had been
sent back from Hilas, or even Leh.'

'The English post is better and safer. Remember we are given all
facilities - and Name of God! - they give them to us too! Is it
unbelievable stupidity?'

'It is pride - pride that deserves and will receive punishment.'

'Yes! To fight a fellow-Continental in our game is something. There
is a risk attached, but these people - bah! It is too easy.'

'Pride - all pride, my friend.'

'Now what the deuce is good of Chandernagore being so close to
Calcutta and all,' said Hurree, snoring open-mouthed on the sodden
moss, 'if I cannot understand their French? They talk so
particularly fast! It would have been much better to cut their
beastly throats.'

When he presented himself again he was racked with a headache -
penitent, and volubly afraid that in his drunkenness he might have
been indiscreet. He loved the British Government - it was the source
of all prosperity and honour, and his master at Rampur held the very
same opinion. Upon this the men began to deride him and to quote
past words, till step by step, with deprecating smirks, oily grins,
and leers of infinite cunning, the poor Babu was beaten out of his
defences and forced to speak - truth. When Lurgan was told the tale
later, he mourned aloud that he could not have been in the place of
the stubborn, inattentive coolies, who with grass mats over their
heads and the raindrops puddling in their footprints, waited on the
wea- ther. All the Sahibs of their acquaintance - rough-clad men
joyously returning year after year to their chosen gullies - had
servants and cooks and orderlies, very often hillmen. These Sahibs
travelled without any retinue. Therefore they were poor Sahibs, and
ignorant; for no Sahib in his senses would follow a Bengali's
advice. But the Bengali, appearing from somewhere, had given them
money, and could make shift with their dialect. Used to
comprehensive ill-treatment from their own colour, they suspected a
trap somewhere, and stood by to run if occasion offered.

Then through the new-washed air, steaming with delicious earth-
smells, the Babu led the way down the slopes - walking ahead of the
coolies in pride; walking behind the foreigners in humility. His
thoughts were many and various. The least of them would have
interested his companions beyond words. But he was an agreeable
guide, ever keen to point out the beauties of his royal master's
domain. He peopled the hills with anything thev had a mind to slay -
thar, ibex, or markhor, and bear by Elisha's allowance. He
discoursed of botany and ethnology with unimpeachable inaccuracy,
and his store of local legends - he had been a trusted agent of the
State for fifteen years, remember - was inexhaustible.

'Decidedly this fellow is an original,' said the taller of the two
foreigners. 'He is like the nightmare of a Viennese courier.'

'He represents in little India in transition - the monstrous
hybridism of East and West,' the Russian replied. 'It is we who can
deal with Orientals.'

'He has lost his own country and has not acquired any other. But he
has a most complete hatred of his conquerors. Listen. He confided to
me last night,' said the other.

Under the striped umbrella Hurree Babu was straining ear and brain
to follow the quick-poured French, and keeping both eyes on a kilta
full of maps and documents - an extra-large one with a double red
oil-skin cover. He did not wish to steal anything. He only desired
to know what to steal, and, incidentally, how to get away when he
had stolen it. He thanked all the Gods of Hindustan, and Herbert
Spencer, that there remained some valuables to steal.

On the second dav the road rose steeply to a grass spur above the
forest; and it was here, about sunset, that they came across an aged
lama - but they called him a bonze - sitting cross-legged above a
mysterious chart held down by stones, which he was explaining to a
young man, evidently a neophyte, of singular, though unwashen,
beauty. The striped umbrella had been sighted half a march away, and
Kim had suggested a halt till it came up to them.

'Ha!' said Hurree Babu, resourceful as Puss-in-Boots. 'That is
eminent local holy man. Probably subject of my royal master.'

'What is he doing? It is very curious.'

'He is expounding holy picture - all hand-worked.'

The two men stood bareheaded in the wash of the afternoon sunlight
low across the gold-coloured grass. The sullen coolies, glad of the
check, halted and slid down their loads.

'Look!' said the Frenchman. 'It is like a picture for the birth of a
religion - the first teacher and the first disciple. Is he a
Buddhist?'

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24