The Jungle Book (19 page)

“I wash, and
also
I take off my skin. How looks the new coat?”

Mowgli ran his hand down the diagonal checkerings of the immense back. “The turtle is harder backed, but not so
gay,” he said judgmatically. “The frog, my name-bearer, is more gay, but not so hard. It is very beautiful to see—like the mottling in the mouth of a lily.”

“It needs water. A new skin never comes to full color before the first bath. Let us go bathe.”

“I will carry thee,” said Mowgli; and he stooped down, laughing, to lift the middle section of Kaa’s great body, just where the barrel was thickest. A man might just as well have tried to heave up a two-foot water main; and Kaa lay still, puffing with quiet amusement. Then their regular evening game began—the boy in the flush of his great strength, and the python in his sumptuous new skin, standing up one against the other for a wrestling match—a trial of eye and strength. Of course, Kaa could have crushed a dozen Mowglis had he let himself go; but he played carefully, and never loosed one-tenth of his power. Ever since Mowgli was strong enough to endure a little rough handling, Kaa had taught him this game, and it suppled his limbs as nothing else could. Sometimes Mowgli would stand lapped almost to his throat in Kaa’s shifting coils, striving to get one arm free and catch him by the throat. Then Kaa would give way limply, and Mowgli, with both quick-moving feet, would try to cramp the purchase of that huge tail as it flung backwards feeling for a rock or a stump. They would rock to and fro, head to head, each waiting
for his chance, till the beautiful, statuelike group melted in a whirl of black-and-yellow coils and struggling legs and arms, to rise up again and again. “Now! Now! Now!” said Kaa, making feints with his head that even Mowgli’s quick hand could not turn aside. “Look! I touch thee here, Little Brother! Here, and here! Are thy hands numb? Here again!”

The game always ended in one way—with a straight, driving blow of the head that knocked the boy over and over. Mowgli could never learn the guard for that lightning lunge, and, as Kaa said, there was not the least use in trying.

“Good hunting!” Kaa grunted at last; and Mowgli, as usual, was shot away half a dozen yards, gasping and laughing. He rose with his fingers full of grass, and followed Kaa to the wise snake’s pet bathing place—a deep, pitchy-black pool surrounded with rocks, and made interesting by sunken tree stumps. The boy slipped in, jungle-fashion, without a sound, and dived across; rose, too, without a sound, and turned on his back, his arms behind his head, watching the moon rising above the rocks, and breaking up her reflection in the water with his toes. Kaa’s diamond-shaped head cut the pool like a razor, and came out to rest on Mowgli’s shoulder. They lay still, soaking luxuriously in the cool water.

“It is
very
good,” said Mowgli at last, sleepily. “Now, in the man pack, at this hour, as I remember, they laid them down
upon hard pieces of wood in the inside of a mud trap, and, having carefully shut out all the clean winds, drew foul cloth over their heavy heads, and made evil songs through their noses. It is better in the jungle.”

A hurrying cobra slipped down over a rock and drank, gave them “Good hunting!” and went away.

“Sssh!” said Kaa, as though he had suddenly remembered something. “So the jungle gives thee all that thou hast ever desired, Little Brother?”

“Not all,” said Mowgli, laughing. “Else there would be a new and strong Shere Khan to kill once a moon.
Now
, I could kill with my own hands, asking no help of buffaloes. And also I have wished the sun to shine in the middle of the rains, and the rains to cover the sun in the deep of summer; and also I have never gone empty but I wished that I had killed a goat; and also I have never killed a goat but I wished it had been buck; nor buck but I wished it had been nilghai. But thus do we feel, all of us.”

“Thou hast no other desire?” the big snake demanded.

“What more can I wish? I have the jungle, and the Favor of the Jungle! Is there more between sunrise and sunset?”

“Now, the Cobra said—” Kaa began.

“What cobra? He that went away just now said nothing. He was hunting.”

“It was another.”

“Hast thou many dealings with the Poison-People? I give them their own path. They carry death in the fore-tooth, and that is not good—for they are so small. But what hood is this thou hast spoken with?”

Kaa rolled slowly in the water like a steamer in a beam sea. “Three or four moons since,” said he, “I hunted in Cold Lairs, which place, maybe, thou hast not forgotten. And the thing I hunted fled shrieking past the tanks and to that house whose side I once broke for thy sake, and ran into the ground.”

“But the people of Cold Lairs do not live in burrows.” Mowgli knew that Kaa was talking of the Monkey-People.

“This thing was not living, but seeking to live,” Kaa replied, with a quiver of his tongue. “He ran into a burrow that led very far. I followed, and having killed, I slept. When I waked I went forward.”

“Under earth?”

“Even so. Coming at last upon a White Hood (a white cobra), who spoke of things beyond my knowledge, and showed me many things I had never before seen.”

“New game? Was it good hunting?” Mowgli turned quickly on his side.

“It was no game, and would have broken all my teeth; but the White Hood said that a man—he spoke as one that knew
the breed—that a man would give the hot breath under his ribs for only the sight of those things.”

“We will look,” said Mowgli. “I now remember that I was once a man.”

“Slowly—slowly. It was haste killed the Yellow Snake that ate the sun. We two spoke together under the earth, and I spoke of thee, naming thee as a man. Said the White Hood (and he is indeed as old as the jungle): ‘It is long since I have seen a man. Let him come, and he shall see all these things, for the least of which very many men would die.’ ”

“That
must
be new game. And yet the Poison-People do not tell us when game is afoot. They are unfriendly folk.”

“It is
not
game. It is—it is—I cannot say what it is.”

“We will go there. I have never seen a White Hood, and I wish to see the other things. Did he kill them?”

“They are all dead things. He says he is the keeper of them all.”

“Ah! As a wolf stands above meat he has taken to his own lair. Let us go.”

Mowgli swam to the bank, rolled in the grass to dry himself, and the two set off for Cold Lairs, the deserted city of which you may have heard. Mowgli was not in the least afraid of the Monkey-People in those days, but the Monkey-People had the liveliest horror of Mowgli. Their tribes, however, were
raiding in the jungle, and so Cold Lairs stood empty and silent in the moonlight. Kaa led up to the ruins of the queen’s pavilion that stood on the terrace, slipped over the rubbish, and dived down the half-choked staircase that went underground from the center of the pavilion. Mowgli gave the Snake Call—“We be of one blood, ye and I”—and followed on his hands and knees. They crawled a long distance down a sloping passage that turned and twisted several times, and at last came to where the root of some great tree, growing thirty feet overhead, had forced out a solid stone in the wall. They crept through the gap, and found themselves in a large vault, whose domed roof had been also broken away by tree roots so that a few streaks of light dropped down into the darkness.

“A safe lair,” said Mowgli, rising to his firm feet, “but over-far to visit daily. And now what do we see?”

“Am I nothing?” said a voice in the middle of the vault; and Mowgli saw something white move, till, little by little, there stood up the hugest cobra he had ever set eyes on—a creature nearly eight feet long, and bleached by being in darkness to an old ivory-white. Even the spectacle marks of his spread hood had faded to a faint yellow. His eyes were as red as rubies, and altogether he was most wonderful to see.

“Good hunting!” said Mowgli, who carried his manners with his knife, and that never left him.

“What of the city?” said the White Cobra, without answering the greeting. “What of the great, the walled city—the city of a hundred elephants and twenty thousand horses, and cattle past counting—the city of the King of Twenty Kings? I grow deaf here, and it is long since I heard the war gongs.”

“The jungle is above our heads,” said Mowgli. “I know only Hathi and his sons among elephants. Bagheera has slain all the horses in one village, and—what is a King?”

“I told thee,” said Kaa softly to the Cobra. “I told thee, four moons ago, that thy city was not.”

“The city—the great city of the forest whose gates are guarded by the King’s towers—can never pass. They built it before my father’s father came from the egg, and it shall endure when my sons’ sons are as white as I. Salomdhi, son of Chandrabija, son of Viyeja, son of Yegasuri, built it in the days of Bappa Rawal. Whose cattle are ye?”

“It is a lost trail,” said Mowgli, turning to Kaa. “I know not his talk.”

“Nor I. He is very old. Father of Cobras, there is only the jungle here, as it has been since the beginning.”

“Then who is
he
,” said the White Cobra, “sitting down before me, unafraid, knowing not the name of the King, talking our talk through a man’s lips? Who is he with the knife and the snake’s tongue?”

“Mowgli they call me,” was the answer. “I am of the jungle. The wolves are my people, and Kaa here is my brother. Father of Cobras, who art thou?”

“I am the Warden of the King’s Treasure. Kurrun Raja built the stone above me, in the days when my skin was dark, that I might teach death to those who came to steal. Then they let down the treasure through the stone, and I heard the song of the Brahmins, my masters.”

“Umm!” said Mowgli to himself. “I have dealt with one Brahmin already, in the man pack, and—I know what I know. Evil comes here in a little.”

“Five times since my wardship has the stone been lifted, but always to let down more, and never to take away. There are no riches like these riches—the treasures of a hundred kings. But it is long and long since the stone was last moved, and I think that my city has forgotten.”

“There is no city. Look up. Yonder are the roots of the great trees tearing the stones apart. Trees and men do not grow together,” Kaa insisted.

“Twice and thrice have men found their way here,” the White Cobra answered savagely. “But they never spoke till I came upon them groping in the dark, and then they cried only a little time. But
ye
come with lies, Man and Snake both, and would have me believe that my city is not, and
that my wardship ends. Little do men change in the years. But
I
change never! Till the stone is lifted, and the Brahmins come down singing the songs that I know, and feed me with warm milk, and take me to the light again, I—I
—I
, and no other, am the Warden of the King’s Treasure! The city is dead, ye say, and here are the roots of the trees? Stoop down, then, and take what ye will. Earth has no treasure like these. Man with the snake’s tongue, if thou canst go alive by the way that thou hast entered at, the lesser kings will be thy servants!”

“Again the trail is lost,” said Mowgli, coolly. “Can any jackal have burrowed so deep and bitten this great White Hood? He is surely mad. Father of Cobras, I see nothing here to take away.”

“By the Gods of the Sun and Moon, it is the madness of death upon the boy!” hissed the cobra. “Before thine eyes close I will allow thee this favor. Look thou, and see what man has never seen before!”

“They do not well in the jungle who speak to Mowgli of favors,” said the boy, between his teeth. “But the dark changes all, as I know. I will look, if that please thee.”

He stared with puckered-up eyes round the vault, and then lifted up from the floor a handful of something that glittered.

“Oho!” said he. “This is like the stuff they play with in the man pack: only this is yellow and the other was brown.”

He let the gold pieces fall, and moved forward. The floor of the vault was buried some five or six feet deep in coined gold and silver that had burst from the sacks it had been originally stored in, and, in the long years, the metal had packed and settled as sand packs at low tide. On it and in it, and rising through it, as wrecks lift through the sand, were jeweled elephant howdahs of embossed silver, studded with plates of hammered gold, and adorned with carbuncles and turquoises. There were palanquins and litters for carrying queens, framed and braced with silver and enamel, with jade-handled poles and amber curtain rings; there were golden candlesticks hung with pierced emeralds that quivered on the branches; there were studded images, five feet high, of forgotten gods, silver with jeweled eyes; there were coats of mail, gold inlaid on steel, and fringed with rotted and blackened seed pearls; there were helmets, crested and beaded with pigeon’s-blood rubies; there were shields of lacquer, of tortoiseshell and rhinoceros hide, strapped and bossed with red gold and set with emeralds at the edge; there were sheaves of diamond-hilted swords, daggers, and hunting knives; there were golden sacrificial bowls and ladles, and portable altars of a shape that never sees the light of day; there were jade cups and bracelets;
there were incense burners, combs, and pots for perfume, henna, and eye powder, all in embossed gold; there were nose rings, armlets, headbands, finger rings, and girdles past any counting; there were belts seven fingers broad, of square-cut diamonds and rubies, and wooden boxes, trebly clamped with iron, from which the wood had fallen away in powder, showing the pile of uncut star sapphires, opals, cat’s-eyes, sapphires, rubies, diamonds, emeralds, and garnets within.

The White Cobra was right. No mere money would begin to pay the value of this treasure, the sifted pickings of centuries of war, plunder, trade, and taxation. The coins alone were priceless, leaving out of count all the precious stones; and the dead weight of the gold and silver alone might be two or three hundred tons. Every native ruler in India today, however poor, has a hoard to which he is always adding; and, though once in a long while some enlightened prince may send off forty or fifty bullock-cart loads of silver to be exchanged for government securities, the bulk of them keep their treasure and the knowledge of it very closely to themselves.