Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (115 page)

At last they entered a world within a world  —  a valley of leagues where the high hills were fashioned of the mere rubble and refuse from off the knees of the mountains. Here one day’s march carried them no farther, it seemed, than a dreamer’s clogged pace bears him in a nightmare. They skirted a shoulder painfully for hours, and, behold, it was but an outlying boss in an outlying buttress of the main pile! A rounded meadow revealed itself, when they had reached it, for a vast tableland running far into the valley. Three days later, it was a dim fold in the earth to southward.

‘Surely the Gods live here,’ said Kim, beaten down by the silence and the appalling sweep and dispersal of the cloud-shadows after rain. ‘This is no place for men!’

‘Long and long ago,’ said the lama, as to himself, ‘it was asked of the Lord whether the world were everlasting. To this the Excellent One returned no answer. . . . When I was in Ceylon, a wise Seeker confirmed that from the gospel which is written in Pali. Certainly, since we know the way to Freedom, the question were unprofitable, but  —  look, and know illusion, chela! These are the true Hills! They are like my hills by Suchzen. Never were such hills!’

Above them, still enormously above them, earth towered away towards the snow-line, where from east to west across hundreds of miles, ruled as with a ruler, the last of the bold birches stopped. Above that, in scarps and blocks upheaved, the rocks strove to fight their heads above the white smother. Above these again, changeless since the world’s beginning, but changing to every mood of sun and cloud, lay out the eternal snow. They could see blots and blurs on its face where storm and wandering wullie-wa got up to dance. Below them, as they stood, the forest slid away in a sheet of blue-green for mile upon mile; below the forest was a village in its sprinkle of terraced fields and steep grazing-grounds; below the village they knew, though a thunderstorm worried and growled there for the moment, a pitch of twelve or fifteen hundred feet gave to the moist valley where the streams gather that are the mothers of young Sutluj.

As usual, the lama had led Kim by cow-track and byroad, far from the main route along which Hurree Babu, that ‘fearful man,’ had bucketed three days before through a storm to which nine Englishmen out of ten would have given full right of way. Hurree was no game-shot,  —  the snick of a trigger made him change colour,  —  but, as he himself would have said, he was ‘fairly effeecient stalker,’ and he had raked the huge valley with a pair of cheap binoculars to some purpose. Moreover, the white of worn canvas tents against green carries far. Hurree Babu had seen all he wanted to see when he sat on the threshing-floor of Ziglaur, twenty miles away as the eagle flies, and forty by road  —  that is to say, two small dots which one day were just below the snow-line, and the next had moved downward perhaps six inches on the hillside. Once cleaned out and set to the work, his fat bare legs could cover a surprising amount of ground, and this was the reason why, while Kim and the lama lay in a leaky hut at Ziglaur till the storm should be overpassed, an oily, wet, but always smiling Bengali, talking the best of English with the vilest of phrases, was ingratiating himself with two sodden and rather rheumatic foreigners. He had arrived, revolving many wild schemes, on the heels of a thunderstorm which had split a pine over against their camp, and so convinced a dozen or two forcibly impressed baggage-coolies the day was inauspicious for farther travel that with one accord they had thrown down their loads and jibbed. They were subjects of a Hill-Rajah who farmed out their services, as is the custom, for his private gain; and, to add to their personal distresses, the strange Sahibs had already threatened them with rifles. The most of them knew rifles and Sahibs of old: they were trackers and shikarris of the Northern valleys, keen after bear and wild goat; but they had never been thus treated in their lives. So the forest took them to her bosom, and, for all oaths and clamour, refused to restore. There was no need to feign madness or  —  the Babu had thought of another means of securing a welcome. He wrung out his wet clothes, slipped on his patent-leather shoes, opened the blue and white umbrella, and with mincing gait and a heart beating against his tonsils appeared as ‘agent for His Royal Highness, the Rajah of Rampur, gentlemen. What can I do for you, please?’

The gentlemen were delighted. One was visibly French, the other Russian, but they spoke English not much inferior to the Babu’s. They begged his kind offices. Their native servants had gone sick at Leh. They had hurried on because they were anxious to bring the spoils of the chase to Simla ere the skins grew moth-eaten. They bore a general letter of introduction (the Babu salaamed to it orientally) to all Government officials. No, they had not met any other shooting-parties en route. They did for themselves. They had plenty of supplies. They only wished to push on as soon as might be. At this he waylaid a cowering hillman among the trees, and after three minutes’ talk and a little silver (one cannot be economical upon State service, though Hurree’s heart bled at the waste) the eleven coolies and the three hangers-on reappeared. At least the Babu would be a witness to oppression.

‘My royal master, he will be much annoyed, but these people are onlee common people and grossly ignorant. If your honours will kindly overlook unfortunate affair, I shall be much pleased. In a little while rain will stop and we can then proceed. You have been shooting, eh? That is fine performance!’

He skipped nimbly from one kilta to the next, making pretence to adjust each conical basket. The Englishman is not, as a rule, familiar with the Asiatic, but he would not strike across the wrist a kindly Babu who had accidentally upset a kilta with a red oilskin top. On the other hand, he would not press drink upon a Babu were he never so friendly, nor would he invite him to meat. The strangers did all these things, and asked many questions,  —  about women mostly,  —  to which Hurree returned gay and unstudied answers. They gave him a glass of whitish fluid like to gin, and then more; and in a little time his gravity departed from him. He became thickly treasonous, and spoke in terms of sweeping indecency of a Government which had forced upon him a white man’s education and neglected to supply him with a white man’s salary. He babbled tales of oppression and wrong till the tears ran down his cheeks for the miseries of his land. Then he staggered off, singing love-songs of Lower Bengal, and collapsed upon a wet tree-trunk. Never was so unfortunate a product of English rule in India more unhappily thrust upon aliens.

‘They are all just of that pattern,’ said one sportsman to the other in French. ‘When we get into India proper thou wilt see. I should like to visit his Rajah. One might speak the good word there. It is possible that he has heard of us and wishes to signify his goodwill.’

‘We have not time. We must get into Simla as soon as may be,’ his companion replied. ‘For my own part, I wish our reports had been sent back from Hilas, or even Leh.’

‘The English post is better and safer. Remember we are given all facilities  —  and name of God!  —  they give them to us too! Is it unbelievable stupidity?’

‘It is pride  —  pride that deserves and will receive punishment.’

‘Yes! To fight a fellow-Continental in our game is something. There is a risk attached, but these people  —  bah! It is too easy.’

‘Pride  —  all pride, my friend.’

‘Now what the deuce is good of Chandernagore being so close to Calcutta and all,’ said Hurree, snoring open-mouthed on the sodden moss, ‘if I cannot understand their French. They talk so par-tic-ularly fast! It would have been much better to cut their beastly throats.’

When he presented himself again he was racked with a headache  —  penitent, and volubly afraid that in his drunkenness he might have been indiscreet. He loved the British Government  —  it was the source of all prosperity and honour, and his master at Rampur held the very same opinion. Upon this the men began to deride him and to quote past words, till step by step, with deprecating smirks, oily grins, and leers of infinite cunning, the poor Babu was beaten out of his defences and forced to speak  —  truth! When Lurgan was told the tale later, he mourned aloud that he could not have been in the place of the stubborn, inattentive coolies, who with grass mats over their heads and the raindrops puddling in their foot-prints, waited on the weather. All the Sahibs of their acquaintance  —  rough-clad men joyously returning year after year to their chosen gullies  —  had servants and cooks and orderlies, very often hillmen. These Sahibs travelled without any retinue. Therefore they were poor Sahibs, and ignorant; for no Sahib in his senses would follow a Bengali’s advice. But the Bengali, appearing from somewhere, had given them money, and would make shift with their dialect. Used to comprehensive ill-treatment from their own colour, they suspected a trap somewhere, and stood by to run if occasion offered.

Then through the new-washed air, steaming with delicious earth-smells, the Babu led the way down the slopes  —  walking ahead of the coolies in pride; walking behind the foreigners in humility. His thoughts were many and various. The least of them would have interested his companions beyond words. But he was an agreeable guide, ever keen to point out the beauties of his royal master’s domain. He peopled the hills with anything they had a mind to slay  —  thar, ibex, or markhor, and bear by Elisha’s allowance. He discoursed of botany and ethnology with unimpeachable inaccuracy, and his store of local legends  —  he had been a trusted agent of the State for fifteen years, remember  —  was inexhaustible.

‘Decidedly this fellow is an original,’ said the taller of the two foreigners. ‘He is like the nightmare of a Viennese courier.’

‘He represents in petto India in transition  —  the monstrous hybridism of East and West,’ the Russian replied. ‘It is we who can deal with Orientals.’

‘He has lost his own country and has not acquired any other. But he has a most complete hatred of his conquerors. Listen. He confides to me last night,’ etc.

Under the striped umbrella Hurree Babu was straining ear and brain to follow the quick-poured French, and keeping both eyes on a kilta full of maps and documents  —  an extra large one with a double red oilskin cover. He did not wish to steal anything. He only desired to know what to steal, and, incidentally, how to get away when he had stolen it. He thanked all the Gods of Hindustan, and Herbert Spencer, that there remained some valuables to steal.

On the second day the road rose steeply to a grass spur above the forest; and it was here, about sunset, that they came across an aged lama  —  but they called him a bonze  —  sitting cross-legged above a mysterious chart held down by stones, which he was explaining to a young man, evidently a neophyte, of singular, though unwashen, beauty. The striped umbrella had been sighted half a march away, and Kim had suggested a halt till it came up to them.

‘Ha!’ said Hurree Babu, resourceful as Puss-in-Boots. ‘That is eminent local holy man. Probably subject of my royal master.’

‘What is he doing? It is very curious.’

‘He is expounding holy picture  —  all hand-worked.’

The two men stood bare-headed in the wash of the afternoon sunlight low across the gold-coloured grass. The sullen coolies, glad of the check, halted and slid down their loads.

‘Look!’ said the Frenchman. ‘It is like a picture for the birth of a religion  —  the first teacher and the first disciple. Is he a Buddhist?’

‘Of some debased kind,’ the other answered. ‘There are no true Buddhists among the Hills. But look at the folds of the drapery. Look at his eyes  —  how insolent! Why does this make one feel that we are so young a people?’ The speaker struck passionately at a tall weed. ‘We have nowhere left our mark yet. Nowhere! That, do you understand, is what disquiets me.’ He scowled at the placid face, and the monumental calm of the pose.

‘Have patience. We shall make your mark together  —  we and you young people. Meantime, draw his picture.’

The Babu advanced loftily; his back out of all keeping with his deferential speech, or his wink towards Kim.

‘Holy One, these be Sahibs. My medicines cured one of a flux, and I go into Simla to oversee his recovery. They wish to see thy picture  —  ’

‘To heal the sick is always good. This is the Wheel of Life,’ said the lama, ‘the same I showed thee in the hut at Ziglaur when the rain fell.’

‘And to hear thee expound it.’

The lama’s eyes lighted at the prospect of new listeners. ‘To expound the Most Excellent Way is good. Have they any knowledge of Hindi, such as had the Keeper of Images?’

‘A little, maybe.’

Hereat, simply as a child engrossed with a new game, the lama threw back his head and began the full-throated invocation of the Doctor of Divinity ere he opens the full doctrine. The strangers leaned on their alpenstocks and listened. Kim, squatting humbly, watched the red sunlight on their faces, and the blend and parting of their long shadows. They wore un-English leggings and curious girt-in belts that reminded him hazily of the pictures in a book at St. Xavier’s library: ‘The Adventures of a Young Naturalist in Mexico’ was its name. Yes, they looked very like the wonderful M. Sumichrast of that tale, and very unlike the ‘highly unscrupulous folk’ of Hurree Babu’s imagining. The coolies, earth-coloured and mute, crouched reverently some twenty or thirty yards away, and the Babu, the slack of his thin gear snapping like a marking-flag in the chill breeze, stood by with an air of happy proprietorship.

‘These are the men,’ Hurree whispered, as the ritual went on and the two whites followed the grass blade sweeping from Hell to Heaven and back again. ‘All their books are in the large kilta with the reddish top,  —  books and reports and maps,  —  and I have seen a King’s letter that either Hilas or Bunar has written. They guard it most carefully. They have sent nothing back from Hilas or Leh. That is sure.’

‘Who is with them?’

‘Only the beggar-coolies. They have no servants. They are so close they cook their own food.’

‘But what am I to do?’

‘Wait and see. Only if any chance comes to me thou wilt know where to seek for the papers.’