Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (114 page)

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-water 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 the “Jataka”; 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 emerges  — 
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!’

‘WHO goes to the Hills goes to his mother.’

They had crossed the Sewaliks 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 Suchzen, 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’ 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 hogback; 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 any one 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 the soft beds and rich food.’

‘We might at the least keep to the road.’

Kim had all a plains-man’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 civilised countries, they would pant over a saddle-back, sidle past a few landslips, and drop through forest at an angle of forty-five on to the road again. Along their track lay the villages of the hill-folk  —  mud and earth huts, the 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 the 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 recognised the big hat, the clicking rosary, and the rare Chinese texts for great authority; and they respected the man under 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 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 gray eagle and an occasional far-seen bear grubbing and rooting on the hillside, the 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 wood-cutters 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 house-tops, or threw his soul after his eye 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 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 bearskin.’

‘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 Kara Korum 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 Han-le (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 come 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.