Kim (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by Rudyard Kipling

  ‘One is paid, I think, already.’ said Kim between his teeth. ‘I kicked him in the groin as we went downhill. Would I had killed him!’

  ‘It is well to be brave when one does not live in Rampur,’ said one whose hut lay within a few miles of the Rajah’s rickety palace. ‘If we get a bad name among the Sahibs, none will employ us as shikarris any more.’

  ‘Oh, but these are not Angrezi Sahibs—not merry-minded men like Fostum Sahib or Yankling Sahib. They are foreigners—they cannot speak Angrezi as do Sahibs.’

  Here the lama coughed and sat up, groping for the rosary.

  ‘There shall be no killing,’ he murmured. Just is the Wheel! Evil on evil—’

  ‘Nay, Holy One. We are all here.’ The Ao-chung man timidly patted his feet. ‘Except by thy order, no one shall be slain. Rest awhile. We will make a little camp here, and later, as the moon rises, we go to Shamlegh-under-the-Snow.’

  ‘After a blow,’ said a Spiti man sententiously, ‘it is best to sleep.’

  ‘There is, as it were, a dizziness at the back of my neck, and a pinching in it. Let me lay my head on thy lap, chela. I am an old man, but not free from passion.... We must think of the Cause of Things.’

  ‘Give him a blanket. We dare not light a fire lest the Sahibs see.’

  ‘Better get away to Shamlegh.336 None will follow us to Shamlegh.’

  This was the nervous Rampur man.

  ‘I have been Fostum Sahib’s shikarri, and I am Yankling Sahib’s shikarri. I should have been with Yankling Sahib now but for this cursed beegar [the corvée].337 Let two men watch below with the guns lest the Sahibs do more foolishness. I shall not leave this Holy One.’

  They sat down a little apart from the lama, and, after listening awhile, passed round a water-pipe whose receiver was an old Day and Martin blacking-bottle. The glow of the red charcoal as it went from hand to hand lit up the narrow, blinking eyes, the high Chinese cheek-bones, and the bull-throats that melted away into the dark duffle folds round the shoulders. They looked like kobolds338 from some magic mine—gnomes of the hills in conclave. And while they talked, the voices of the snow-waters round them diminished one by one as the night-frost choked and clogged the runnels.

  ‘How he stood up against us!’ said a Spiti man admiring. ‘I remember an old ibex, out Ladakhway, that Dupont Sahib missed on a shoulder-shot, seven seasons back, standing up just like him. Dupont Sahib was a good shikarri.’

  ‘Not as good as Yankling Sahib.’ The Ao-chung man took a pull at the whisky-bottle and passed it over. ‘Now hear me—unless any other man thinks he knows more.’

  The challenge was not taken up.

  ‘We go to Shamlegh when the moon rises. There we will fairly divide the baggage between us. I am content with this new little rifle and all its cartridges.’

  ‘Are the bears only bad on thy holding?’ said a mate, sucking at his pipe.

  ‘No; but musk-pods are worth six rupees apiece now, and thy women can have the canvas of the tents and some of the cooking-gear. We will do all that at Shamlegh before dawn. Then we all go our ways, remembering that we have never seen or taken service with these Sahibs, who may, indeed, say that we have stolen their baggage.’

  ‘That is well for thee, but what will our Rajah say?’

  ‘Who is to tell him? Those Sahibs, who cannot speak our talk, or the Babu, who for his own ends gave us money? Will he lead an army against us? What evidence will remain? That we do not need we shall throw on Shamlegh-midden, where no man has yet set foot.’

  ‘Who is at Shamlegh this summer?’ The place was only a grazing centre of three or four huts.

  ‘The Woman of Shamlegh. She has no love for Sahibs, as we know. The others can be pleased with little presents; and here is enough for us all.’ He patted the fat sides of the nearest basket.

  ‘But—but—’

  ‘I have said they are not true Sahibs. All their skins and heads were bought in the bazar at Leh. I know the marks. I showed them to ye last march.’

  ‘True. They were all bought skins and heads. Some had even the moth in them.’

  That was a shrewd argument, and the Ao-chung man knew his fellows.

  ‘If the worst comes to the worst, I shall tell Yankling Sahib, who is a man of a merry mind, and he will laugh. We are not doing any wrong to any Sahibs whom we know. They are priest-beaters. They frightened us. We fled! Who knows where we dropped the baggage? Do ye think Yankling Sahib will permit down-country police to wander all over the hills, disturbing his game? It is a far cry from Simla to Chini, and farther from Shamlegh to Shamlegh-midden.’

  ‘So be it, but I carry the big kilta. The basket with the red top that the Sahibs pack themselves every morning.’

  ‘Thus it is proved,’ said the Shamlegh man adroitly, ‘that they are Sahibs of no account. Who ever heard of Fostum Sahib, or Yankling Sahib, or even the little Peel Sahib that sits up at nights to shoot serow339—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 demoralising 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. To-night 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 passe
d 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 civilisation; 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 Kabir340)

  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-cups and bags, 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 block-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 hill-women.

  ‘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 non
e 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 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.341 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-backed342 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 handwritten 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,343 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 window-sill. 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 window, strained his young ears, never a sound came up from the gulf.