Kim
serow—I say, who, ever heard of these Sahibs coming into the hills
without a down-country cook, and a bearer, and—and all manner of
well-paid, high-handed and oppressive folk in their tail? How can they
make trouble? What of the _kilta?_”
“Nothing, but that it is full of the Written Word—books and papers in
which they wrote, and strange instruments, as of worship.”
“Shamlegh-midden will take them all.”
“True! But how if we insult the Sahibs’ Gods thereby! I do not like to
handle the Written Word in that fashion. And their brass idols are
beyond my comprehension. It is no plunder for simple hill-folk.”
“The old man still sleeps. Hst! We will ask his _chela_.” The Ao-chung
man refreshed himself, and swelled with pride of leadership.
“We have here,” he whispered, “a _kilta_ whose nature we do not know.”
“But I do,” said Kim cautiously. The lama drew breath in natural, easy
sleep, and Kim had been thinking of Hurree’s last words. As a player of
the Great Game, he was disposed just then to reverence the Babu. “It is
a _kilta_ with a red top full of very wonderful things, not to be
handled by fools.”
“I said it; I said it,” cried the bearer of that burden. “Thinkest thou
it will betray us?”
“Not if it be given to me. I can draw out its magic. Otherwise it will
do great harm.”
“A priest always takes his share.” Whisky was demoralizing the Ao-chung
man.
“It is no matter to me.” Kim answered, with the craft of his
mother-country. “Share it among you, and see what comes!”
“Not I. I was only jesting. Give the order. There is more than enough
for us all. We go our way from Shamlegh in the dawn.”
They arranged and re-arranged their artless little plans for another
hour, while Kim shivered with cold and pride. The humour of the
situation tickled the Irish and the Oriental in his soul. Here were the
emissaries of the dread Power of the North, very possibly as great in
their own land as Mahbub or Colonel Creighton, suddenly smitten
helpless. One of them, he privately knew, would be lame for a time.
They had made promises to Kings. Tonight they lay out somewhere below
him, chartless, foodless, tentless, gunless—except for Hurree Babu,
guideless. And this collapse of their Great Game (Kim wondered to whom
they would report it), this panicky bolt into the night, had come about
through no craft of Hurree’s or contrivance of Kim’s, but simply,
beautifully, and inevitably as the capture of Mahbub’s _faquir_-friends
by the zealous young policeman at Umballa.
“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 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.”
CHAPTER 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.
KABIR.
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 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