At last they entered a world within a world -- a valley of leagues where the high hills were fashioned of a 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 . On 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 XXXXX had led Kim by cow-track and by-road , 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 .
Pali Suchzen chela day hours lama scarps snow-line storm thunderstorm