Kim
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 Kedarnath 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 Hanlé (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. On 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