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 fakir-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 Hilas, Bunar, 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 14
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.
The Prayer.
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