Kim
suppose.” He laid them aside. “The letters I do not understand, but
Colonel Creighton will. They must all be kept. The maps—they draw
better maps than me—of course. All the native letters—oho!—and
particularly the _murasla_.” He sniffed the embroidered bag. “That must
be from Hilás or Bunár, and Hurree Babu spoke truth. By Jove! It is a
fine haul. I wish Hurree could know ... The rest must go out of the
window.” He fingered a superb prismatic compass and the shiny top of a
theodolite. But after all, a Sahib cannot very well steal, and the
things might be inconvenient evidence later. He sorted out every scrap
of manuscript, every map, and the native letters. They made one softish
slab. The three locked ferril-backed books, with five worn
pocket-books, he put aside.
“The letters and the _murasla_ I must carry inside my coat and under my
belt, and the hand-written books I must put into the food-bag. It will
be very heavy. No. I do not think there is anything more. If there is,
the coolies have thrown it down the _khud_, so _thatt_ is all right.
Now you go too.” He repacked the _kilta_ with all he meant to lose, and
hove it up on to the windowsill. A thousand feet below lay a long,
lazy, round-shouldered bank of mist, as yet untouched by the morning
sun. A thousand feet below that was a hundred-year-old pine-forest. He
could see the green tops looking like a bed of moss when a wind-eddy
thinned the cloud.
“No! I don’t think any one will go after _you!_”
The wheeling basket vomited its contents as it dropped. The theodolite
hit a jutting cliff-ledge and exploded like a shell; the books,
inkstands, paint-boxes, compasses, and rulers showed for a few seconds
like a swarm of bees. Then they vanished; and, though Kim, hanging half
out of the window, strained his young ears, never a sound came up from
the gulf.
“Five hundred—a thousand rupees could not buy them,” he thought
sorrowfully. “It was verree wasteful, but I have all their other
stuff—everything they did—I hope. Now how the deuce am I to tell Hurree
Babu, and _whatt_ the deuce am I to do? And my old man is sick. I must
tie up the letters in oilskin. That is something to do first—else they
will get all sweated ... And I am all alone!” He bound them into a neat
packet, swedging down the stiff, sticky oilskin at the comers, for his
roving life had made him as methodical as an old hunter in matters of
the road. Then with double care he packed away the books at the bottom
of the food-bag.
The woman rapped at the door.
“But thou hast made no charm,” she said, looking about.
“There is no need.” Kim had completely overlooked the necessity for a
little patter-talk. The woman laughed at his confusion irreverently.
“None—for thee. Thou canst cast a spell by the mere winking of an eye.
But think of us poor people when thou art gone. They were all too drunk
last night to hear a woman. Thou art not drunk?”
“I am a priest.” Kim had recovered himself, and, the woman being aught
but unlovely, thought best to stand on his office.
“I warned them that the Sahibs will be angry and will make an
inquisition and a report to the Rajah. There is also the Babu with
them. Clerks have long tongues.”
“Is that all thy trouble?” The plan rose fully formed in Kim’s mind,
and he smiled ravishingly.
“Not all,” quoth the woman, putting out a hard brown hand all covered
with turquoises set in silver.
“I can finish that in a breath,” he went on quickly. “The Babu is the
very _hakim_ (thou hast heard of him?) who was wandering among the
hills by Ziglaur. I know him.”
“He will tell for the sake of a reward. Sahibs cannot distinguish one
hillman from another, but Babus have eyes for men—and women.”
“Carry a word to him from me.”
“There is nothing I would not do for thee.”
He accepted the compliment calmly, as men must in lands where women
make the love, tore a leaf from a note-book, and with a patent
indelible pencil wrote in gross Shikast—the script that bad little boys
use when they write dirt on walls: “_I have everything that they have
written: their pictures of the country, and many letters. Especially
the murasla. Tell me what to do. I am at Shamlegh-under-the-Snow. The
old man is sick._”
“Take this to him. It will altogether shut his mouth. He cannot have
gone far.”
“Indeed no. They are still in the forest across the spur. Our children
went to watch them when the light came, and have cried the news as they
moved.”
Kim looked his astonishment; but from the edge of the sheep-pasture
floated a shrill, kite-like trill. A child tending cattle had picked it
up from a brother or sister on the far side of the slope that commanded
Chini valley.
“My husbands are also out there gathering wood.” She drew a handful of
walnuts from her bosom, split one neatly, and began to eat. Kim
affected blank ignorance.
“Dost thou not know the meaning of the walnut—priest?” she said coyly,
and handed him the half-shells.
“Well thought of.” He slipped the piece of paper between them quickly.
“Hast thou a little wax to close them on this letter?”
The woman sighed aloud, and Kim relented.
“There is no payment till service has been rendered. Carry this to the
Babu, and say it was sent by the Son of the Charm.”
“Ai! Truly! Truly! By a magician—who is like a Sahib.”
“Nay, a Son of the Charm: and ask if there be any answer.”
“But if he offer a rudeness? I—I am afraid.”
Kim laughed. “He is, I have no doubt, very tired and very hungry. The
Hills make cold bedfellows. Hai, my”—it was on the tip of his tongue to
say Mother, but he turned it to Sister—“thou art a wise and witty
woman. By this time all the villages know what has befallen the
Sahibs—eh?”
“True. News was at Ziglaur by midnight, and by tomorrow should be at
Kotgarh. The villages are both afraid and angry.”
“No need. Tell the villages to feed the Sahibs and pass them on, in
peace. We must get them quietly away from our valleys. To steal is one
thing—to kill another. The Babu will understand, and there will be no
after-complaints. Be swift. I must tend my master when he wakes.”
“So be it. After service—thou hast said?—comes the reward. I am the
Woman of Shamlegh, and I hold from the Rajah. I am no common bearer of
babes. Shamlegh is thine: hoof and horn and hide, milk and butter. Take
or leave.”
She turned resolutely uphill, her silver necklaces clicking on her
broad breast, to meet the morning sun fifteen hundred feet above them.
This time Kim thought in the vernacular as he waxed down the oilskin
edges of the packets.
“How can a man follow the Way or the Great Game when he is so—always
pestered by women? There was that girl at Akrola of the Ford; and there
was the scullion’s wife behind the dovecot—not counting the others—and
now comes this one! When I was a child it was well enough, but now I am
a man and they will not regard me as a man. Walnuts, indeed! Ho! ho! It
is almonds in the Plains!”
He went out to levy on the village—not with a begging-bowl, which might
do for down-country, but in the manner of a prince. Shamlegh’s summer
population is only three families—four women and eight or nine men.
They were all full of tinned meats and mixed drinks, from ammoniated
quinine to white vodka, for they had taken their full share in the
overnight loot. The neat Continental tents had been cut up and shared
long ago, and there were patent aluminium saucepans abroad.
But they considered the lama’s presence a perfect safeguard against all
consequences, and impenitently brought Kim of their best—even to a
drink of _chang_—the barley-beer that comes from Ladakh-way. Then they
thawed out in the sun, and sat with their legs hanging over infinite
abysses, chattering, laughing, and smoking. They judged India and its
Government solely from their experience of wandering Sahibs who had
employed them or their friends as _shikarris_. Kim heard tales of shots
missed upon ibex, serow, or markhor, by Sahibs twenty years in their
graves—every detail lighted from behind like twigs on tree-tops seen
against lightning. They told him of their little diseases, and, more
important, the diseases of their tiny, sure-footed cattle; of trips as
far as Kotgarh, where the strange missionaries live, and beyond even to
marvellous Simla, where the streets are paved with silver, and anyone,
look you, can get service with the Sahibs, who ride about in
two-wheeled carts and spend money with a spade. Presently, grave and
aloof, walking very heavily, the lama joined himself to the chatter
under the eaves, and they gave him great room. The thin air refreshed
him, and he sat on the edge of precipices with the best of them, and,
when talk languished, flung pebbles into the void. Thirty miles away,
as the eagle flies, lay the next range, seamed and channelled and
pitted with little patches of brush—forests, each a day’s dark march.
Behind the village, Shamlegh hill itself cut off all view to southward.
It was like sitting in a swallow’s nest under the eaves of the roof of
the world.
From time to time the lama stretched out his hand, and with a little
low-voiced prompting would point out the road to Spiti and north across
the Parungla.
“Beyond, where the hills lie thickest, lies De-ch’en” (he meant
Han-lé’), “the great Monastery. s’Tag-stan-ras-ch’en built it, and of
him there runs this tale.” Whereupon he told it: a fantastic piled
narrative of bewitchment and miracles that set Shamlegh a-gasping.
Turning west a little, he steered for the green hills of Kulu, and
sought Kailung under the glaciers. “For thither came I in the old, old
days. From Leh I came, over the Baralachi.”
“Yes, yes; we know it,” said the far-faring people of Shamlegh.
“And I slept two nights with the priests of Kailung. These are the
Hills of my delight! Shadows blessed above all other shadows! There my
eyes opened on this world; there my eyes were opened to this world;
there I found Enlightenment; and there I girt my loins for my Search.
Out of the Hills I came—the high Hills and the strong winds. Oh, just
is the Wheel!” He blessed them in detail—the great glaciers, the naked
rocks, the piled moraines and tumbled shale; dry upland, hidden
salt-lake, age-old timber and fruitful water-shot valley one after the
other, as a dying man blesses his folk; and Kim marvelled at his
passion.
“Yes—yes. There is no place like our Hills,” said the people of
Shamlegh. And they fell to wondering how a man could live in the hot
terrible Plains where the cattle run as big as elephants, unfit to
plough on a hillside; where village touches village, they had heard,
for a hundred miles; where folk went about stealing in gangs, and what
the robbers spared the Police carried utterly away.
So the still forenoon wore through, and at the end of it Kim’s
messenger dropped from the steep pasture as unbreathed as when she had
set out.
“I sent a word to the _hakim_,” Kim explained, while she made
reverence.
“He joined himself to the idolaters? Nay, I remember he did a healing
upon one of them. He has acquired merit, though the healed employed his
strength for evil. Just is the Wheel! What of the _hakim?_”
“I feared that thou hadst been bruised and—and I knew he was wise.” Kim
took the waxed walnut-shell and read in English on the back of his
note: _Your favour received. Cannot get away from present company at
present, but shall take them into Simla. After which, hope to rejoin
you. Inexpedient to follow angry gentlemen. Return by same road you
came, and will overtake. Highly gratified about correspondence due to
my forethought._ “He says, Holy One, that he will escape from the
idolaters, and will return to us. Shall we wait awhile at Shamlegh,
then?”
The lama looked long and lovingly upon the hills and shook his head.