Kim
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
_Jâtaka;_ 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 XIII
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’