The Man Who Would Be King

by Rudyard Kipling

  ‘Fat pig!’ said Peroo. ‘After all that we have done for him! When the flood is down I will see to it that we get a new guru. Finlinson Sahib, it darkens for night now, and since yesterday nothing has been eaten. Be wise, Sahib. No man can endure watching and great thinking on an empty belly. Lie down, Sahib. The river will do what the river will do.’

  ‘The bridge is mine; I cannot leave it.’

  ‘Wilt thou hold it up with thy hands, then?’ said Peroo, laughing. ‘I was troubled for my boats and sheers before the flood came. Now we are in the hands of the Gods. The Sahib will not eat and lie down? Take these, then. They are meat and good toddy together, and they kill all weariness, besides the fever that follows the rain. I have eaten nothing else to-day at all.’

  He took a small tin tobacco-box from his sodden waist-belt and thrust it into Findlayson’s hand, saying, ‘Nay, do not be afraid. It is no more than opium – clean Malwa opium!’

  Findlayson shook two or three of the dark-brown pellets into his hand, and, hardly knowing what he did, swallowed them. The stuff was at least a good guard against fever – the fever that was creeping upon him out of the wet mud – and he had seen what Peroo could do in the stewing mists of autumn on the strength of a dose from the tin box.

  Peroo nodded with bright eyes. ‘In a little – in a little the Sahib will find that he thinks well again. I too will –’ He dived into his treasure-box, resettled the rain-coat over his head, and squatted down to watch the boats. It was too dark now to see beyond the first pier, and the night seemed to have given the river new strength. Findlayson stood with his chin on his chest, thinking. There was one point about one of the piers – the Seventh – that he had not fully settled in his mind. The figures would not shape themselves to the eye except one by one and at enormous intervals of time. There was a sound, rich and mellow in his ears, like the deepest note of a double-bass – an entrancing sound upon which he pondered for several hours, as it seemed. Then Peroo was at his elbow, shouting that a wire hawser had snapped and the stone-boats were loose. Findlayson saw the fleet open and swing out fanwise to a long-drawn shriek of wire straining across gunnels.

  ‘A tree hit them. They will all go,’ cried Peroo. ‘The main hawser has parted. What does the Sahib do?’

  An immensely complex plan had suddenly flashed into Findlayson’s mind. He saw the ropes running from boat to boat in straight lines and angles – each rope a line of white fire. But there was one rope which was the master-rope. He could see that rope. If he could pull it once, it was absolutely and mathematically certain that the disordered fleet would reassemble itself in the backwater behind the guard-tower. But why, he wondered, was Peroo clinging so desperately to his waist as he hastened down the bank? It was necessary to put the Lascar aside, gently and slowly, because it was necessary to save the boats, and, further, to demonstrate the extreme ease of the problem that looked so difficult. And then – but it was of no conceivable importance – a wire rope raced through his hand, burning it, the high bank disappeared, and with it all the slowly dispersing factors of the problem. He was sitting in the rainy darkness – sitting in a boat that spun like a top, and Peroo was standing over him.

  ‘I had forgotten,’ said the Lascar slowly, ‘that to those fasting and unused the opium is worse than any wine. Those who die in Gunga go to the Gods. Still, I have no desire to present myself before such great ones. Can the Sahib swim?’

  ‘What need? He can fly – fly as swiftly as the wind,’ was the thick answer.

  ‘He is mad!’ muttered Peroo under his breath. ‘And he threw me aside like a bundle of dung-cakes. Well, he will not know his death. The boat cannot live an hour here even if she strike nothing. It is not good to look at death with a clear eye.’

  He refreshed himself again from the tin box, squatted down in the bows of the reeling, pegged, and stitched craft,24 staring through the mist at the nothing that was there. A warm drowsiness crept over Findlayson, the Chief Engineer, whose duty was with his bridge. The heavy raindrops struck him with a thousand tingling little thrills, and the weight of all time since time was made hung heavy on his eyelids. He thought and perceived that he was perfectly secure, for the water was so solid that a man could surely step out upon it, and, standing still with his legs apart to keep his balance – this was the most important point – would be borne with great and easy speed to the shore. But yet a better plan came to him. It needed only an exertion of will for the soul to hurl the body ashore as wind drives paper; to waft it kite-fashion to the bank. Thereafter – the boat spun dizzily – suppose the high wind got under the freed body? Would it tower up like a kite and pitch headlong on the far-away sands, or would it duck about beyond control through all eternity? Findlayson gripped the gunnel to anchor himself, for it seemed that he was on the edge of taking the flight before he had settled all his plans. Opium has more effect on the white man than the black. Peroo was only comfortably indifferent to accidents. ‘She cannot live,’ he grunted. ‘Her seams open already. If she were even a dinghy with oars we could have ridden it out; but a box with holes is no good. Finlinson Sahib, she fills.’

  ‘Achcha! I am going away. Come thou also.’

  In his mind Findlayson had already escaped from the boat, and was circling high in air to find a rest for the sole of his foot. His body – he was really sorry for its gross helplessness – lay in the stern, the water rushing about its knees.

  ‘How very ridiculous!’ he said to himself, from his eyrie. ‘That – is Findlayson – chief of the Kashi Bridge. The poor beast is going to be drowned, too. Drowned when it’s close to shore. I’m – I’m on shore already. Why doesn’t it come along?’

  To his intense disgust, he found his soul back in his body again, and that body spluttering and choking in deep water. The pain of the reunion was atrocious, but it was necessary, also, to fight for the body. He was conscious of grasping wildly at wet sand, and striding prodigiously, as one strides in a dream, to keep foothold in the swirling water, till at last he hauled himself clear of the hold of the river, and dropped, panting, on wet earth.

  ‘Not this night,’ said Peroo in his ear. ‘The Gods have protected us.’ The Lascar moved his feet cautiously, and they rustled among dried stumps. ‘This is some island of last year’s indigo crop,’ he went on. ‘We shall find no men here; but have great care, Sahib; all the snakes of a hundred miles have been flooded out. Here comes the lightning, on the heels of the wind. Now we shall be able to look; but walk carefully.’

  Findlayson was far and far beyond any fear of snakes, or indeed any merely human emotion. He saw, after he had rubbed the water from his eyes, with an immense clearness, and trod, so it seemed to himself, with world-encompassing strides. Somewhere in the night of time he had built a bridge – a bridge that spanned illimitable levels of shining seas; but the Deluge had swept it away, leaving this one island under heaven for Findlayson and his companion, sole survivors of the breed of man.

  An incessant lightning, forked and blue, showed all that there was to be seen on the little patch in the flood – a clump of thorn, a clump of swaying, creaking bamboos, and a grey gnarled peepul25 overshadowing a Hindu shrine, from whose dome floated a tattered red flag. The holy man whose summer resting-place it was had long since abandoned it, and the weather had broken the red-daubed image of his God. The two men stumbled, heavy-limbed and heavy-eyed, over the ashes of a brick-set cooking-place, and dropped down under the shelter of the branches, while the rain and river roared together.

  The stumps of the indigo crackled, and there was a smell of cattle, as a huge and dripping Brahmini Bull26 shouldered his way under the tree. The flashes revealed the trident mark of Shiva on his flank, the insolence of head and hump, the luminous stag-like eyes, the brow crowned with a wreath of sodden marigold blooms, and the silky dewlap that nigh swept the ground. There was a noise behind him of other beasts coming up from the flood-line through the thicket, a sound of heavy feet and deep breathing.

  ‘Here be m
ore besides ourselves,’ said Findlayson, his head against the tree-bole, looking through half-shut eyes, wholly at ease.

  ‘Truly,’ said Peroo thickly, ‘and no small ones.’

  ‘What are they, then? I do not see clearly.’

  ‘The Gods. Who else? Look!’

  ‘Ah, true! The Gods surely – the Gods.’ Findlayson smiled as his head fell forward on his chest. Peroo was eminently right. After the Flood, who should be alive in the land except the Gods that made it – the Gods to whom his village prayed nightly – the Gods who were in all men’s mouths and about all men’s ways? He could not raise his head or stir a finger for the trance that held him, and Peroo was smiling vacantly at the lightning.

  The Bull paused by the shrine, his head lowered to the damp earth. A green Parrot27 in the branches preened his wet wings and screamed against the thunder as the circle under the tree filled with the shifting shadows of beasts. There was a Blackbuck at the Bull’s heels – such a buck as Findlayson in his far-away life upon earth might have seen in dreams – a buck with a royal head, ebon back, silver belly, and gleaming straight horns. Beside him, her head bowed to the ground, the green eyes burning under the heavy brows, with restless tail switching the dead grass, paced a Tigress, full-bellied and deep-jowled.

  The Bull crouched beside the shrine, and there leaped from the darkness a monstrous grey Ape, who seated himself man-wise in the place of the fallen image, and the rain spilled like jewels from the hair of his neck and shoulders.

  Other shadows came and went behind the circle, among them a drunken Man flourishing staff and drinking-bottle. Then a hoarse bellow broke out from near the ground. ‘The flood lessens even now,’ it cried. ‘Hour by hour the water falls, and their bridge still stands!’

  ‘My bridge,’ said Findlayson to himself. ‘That must be very old work now. What have the Gods to do with my bridge?’

  His eyes rolled in the darkness following the roar. A Crocodile – the blunt-nosed, ford-haunting Mugger28 of the Ganges – draggled herself before the beasts, lashing furiously to right and left with her tail.

  ‘They have made it too strong for me. In all this night I have only torn away a handful of planks. The walls stand! The towers stand! They have chained my flood, and my river is not free any more. Heavenly Ones, take this yoke away! Give me clear water between bank and bank! It is I, Mother Gunga, that speak. The Justice of the Gods! Deal me the Justice of the Gods!’

  ‘What said I?’ whispered Peroo. ‘This is in truth a Punchayet29 of the Gods. Now we know that all the world is dead, save you and I, Sahib.’

  The Parrot screamed and fluttered again, and the Tigress, her ears flat to her head, snarled wickedly.

  Somewhere in the shadow a great trunk and gleaming tusks swayed to and fro, and a low gurgle broke the silence that followed on the snarl.

  ‘We be here,’ said a deep voice, ‘the Great Ones. One only and very many. Shiv, my father, is here, with Indra. Kali30 has spoken already. Hanuman listens also.’

  ‘Kashi is without her Kotwal31 to-night,’ shouted the Man with the drinking-bottle, flinging his staff to the ground, while the island rang to the baying of hounds. ‘Give her the Justice of the Gods!’

  ‘Ye were still when they polluted my waters,’ the great Crocodile bellowed. ‘Ye made no sign when my river was trapped between the walls. I had no help save my own strength, and that failed – the strength of Mother Gunga failed – before their guard-towers. What could I do? I have done everything. Finish now, Heavenly Ones!’

  ‘I brought the death; I rode the spotted sickness from hut to hut of their workmen, and yet they would not cease.’ A nose-slitten, hide-worn Ass,32 lame, scissor-legged, and galled, limped forward. ‘I cast the death at them out of my nostrils, but they would not cease.’

  Peroo would have moved, but the opium lay heavy upon him.

  ‘Bah!’ he said, spitting. ‘Here is Sitala herself; Mata – the smallpox. Has the Sahib a handkerchief to put over his face?’

  ‘Small help!’ said the Crocodile. ‘They fed me the corpses for a month, and I flung them out on my sand-bars, but their work went forward. Demons they are, and sons of demons! And ye left Mother Gunga alone for their fire-carriage to make a mock of. The Justice of the Gods on the bridge-builders!’

  The Bull turned the cud in his mouth and answered slowly, ‘If the Justice of the Gods caught all who made a mock of holy things, there would be many dark altars in the land, Mother.’

  ‘But this goes beyond a mock,’ said the Tigress, darting forward a griping paw. ‘Thou knowest, Shiv, and ye too, Heavenly Ones; ye know that they have defiled Gunga. Surely they must come to the Destroyer. Let Indra judge.’

  The Buck made no movement as he answered, ‘How long has this evil been?’

  ‘Three years, as men count years,’ said the Mugger, close pressed to the earth.

  ‘Does Mother Gunga die, then, in a year, that she is so anxious to see vengeance now? The deep sea was where she runs but yesterday, and tomorrow the sea shall cover her again as the Gods count that which men call time. Can any say that this their bridge endures till to-morrow?’ said the Buck.

  There was a long hush, and in the clearing of the storm the full moon stood up above the dripping trees.

  ‘Judge ye, then,’ said the Mugger sullenly. ‘I have spoken my shame. The flood falls still. I can do no more.’

  ‘For my own part’ – it was the voice of the great Ape seated within the shrine – ‘it pleases me well to watch these men, remembering that I also builded no small bridge33 in the world’s youth.’

  ‘They say, too,’ snarled the Tiger, ‘that these men came of the wreck of thy armies, Hanuman,34 and therefore thou hast aided –’

  ‘They toil as my armies toiled in Lanka, and they believe that their toil endures. Indra is too high, but, Shiv, thou knowest how the land is threaded with their fire-carriages.’

  ‘Yea, I know,’ said the Bull. ‘Their Gods instructed them in the matter.’

  A laugh ran round the circle.

  ‘Their Gods! What should their Gods know? They were born yesterday, and those that made them are scarcely yet cold,’ said the Mugger. ‘To-morrow their Gods will die.’

  ‘Ho!’ said Peroo. ‘Mother Gunga talks good talk. I told that to the Padre-Sahib who preached on the Mombasa, and he asked the Burra Malum to put me in irons for a great rudeness.’

  ‘Surely they make these things to please their Gods,’ said the Bull again.

  ‘Not altogether,’ the Elephant rolled forth. ‘It is for the profit of my mahajuns35 – my fat money-lenders that worship me at each new year, when they draw my image at the head of the account-books. I, looking over their shoulders by lamplight, see that the names in the books are those of men in far places – for all the towns are drawn together by the fire-carriage, and the money comes and goes swiftly, and the account-books grow as fat as – myself. And I, who am Ganesh of Good Luck, I bless my peoples.’

  ‘They have changed the face of the land – which is my land. They have killed and made new towns on my banks,’ said the Mugger.

  ‘It is but the shifting of a little dirt. Let the dirt dig in the dirt if it pleases the dirt,’ answered the Elephant.

  ‘But afterwards?’ said the Tiger. ‘Afterwards they will see that Mother Gunga can avenge no insult, and they fall away from her first, and later from us all, one by one. In the end, Ganesh, we are left with naked altars.’

  The drunken Man staggered to his feet, and hiccupped vehemently in the face of the assembled Gods.

  ‘Kali lies. My sister lies. Also this my stick is the Kotwal of Kashi, and he keeps tally of my pilgrims. When the time comes to worship Bhairon – and it is always time – the fire-carriages move one by one, and each bears a thousand pilgrims. They do not come afoot any more, but rolling upon wheels, and my honour is increased.’

  ‘Gunga, I have seen thy bed at Prayag36 black with the pilgrims,’ said the Ape, leaning forward, ‘and but for the fire-car
riage they would have come slowly and in fewer numbers. Remember.’

  ‘They come to me always,’ Bhairon went on thickly. ‘By day and night they pray to me, all the Common People in the fields and the roads. Who is like Bhairon to-day? What talk is this of changing faiths? Is my staff Kotwal of Kashi for nothing? He keeps the tally, and he says that never were so many altars as to-day, and the fire-carriage serves them well. Bhairon am I – Bhairon of the Common People, and the chiefest of the Heavenly Ones to-day. Also my staff says –’

  ‘Peace, thou!’ lowed the Bull. ‘The worship of the schools is mine, and they talk very wisely, asking whether I be one or many, as is the delight of my people, and ye know what I am. Kali, my wife, thou knowest also.’

  ‘Yea, I know,’ said the Tigress, with lowered head.

  ‘Greater am I than Gunga also. For ye know who moved the minds of men that they should count Gunga holy among the rivers. Who die in that water – ye know how men say – come to Us without punishment, and Gunga knows that the fire-carriage has borne to her scores upon scores of such anxious ones; and Kali knows that she has held her chiefest festivals among the pilgrimages that are fed by the fire-carriage. Who smote at Puri, under the Image there,37 her thousands in a day and a night, and bound the sickness to the wheels of the fire-carriages, so that it ran from one end of the land to the other? Who but Kali? Before the fire-carriage came it was a heavy toil. The fire-carriages have served thee well, Mother of Death. But I speak for mine own altars, who am not Bhairon of the Common Folk, but Shiv. Men go to and fro, making words and telling talk of strange Gods, and I listen. Faith follows faith among my people in the schools, and I have no anger; for when the words are said, and the new talk is ended, to Shiv men return at the last.’

  ‘True. It is true,’ murmured Hanuman. ‘To Shiv and to the others, Mother, they return. I creep from temple to temple in the North, where they worship one God and His Prophet; and presently my image is alone within their shrines.’