The Search is sure ! ' He set his ivory-yellow face , serene and untroubled , towards the beckoning Hills ; his shadow shouldering far before him in the dust . Chapter 13 Who hath desired the Sea -- the immense and contemptuous surges ? The shudder , the stumble , the swerve ere the star-stabbing bowsprit merges -- The orderly clouds of the Trades and the ridged roaring sapphire thereunder -- Unheralded cliff-lurking flaws and the head-sails ' low-volleying thunder ? His Sea in no wonder the same -- his Sea and the same in each wonder -- His Sea that his being fulfils ? So and no otherwise -- so and no otherwise hill-men desire their hills ! The Sea and the Hills . ` Who goes to the hills goes to his mother . ' They had crossed the Siwaliks and the half-tropical Doon , left Mussoorie behind them , and headed north along the narrow hill-roads . Day after day they struck deeper into the huddled mountains , and day after day Kim watched the lama return to a man 's strength . Among the terraces of the Doon he had leaned on the boy 's shoulder , ready to profit by wayside halts . Under the great ramp to Mussoorie he drew himself together as an old hunter faces a well-remembered bank , and where he should have sunk exhausted swung his long draperies about him , drew a deep double-lungful of the diamond air , and walked as only a hillman can . Kim , plains-bred and plains-fed , sweated and panted astonished . ` This is my country , ' said the lama . ` Beside Such-zen , this is flatter than a rice-field ' ; and with steady , driving strokes from the loins he strode upwards . But it was on the steep downhill marches , three thousand feet in three hours , that he went utterly away from Kim , whose back ached with holding back , and whose big toe was nigh cut off by his grass sandal-string . Through the speckled shadow of the great deodar-forests ; through oak feathered and plumed with ferns ; birch , ilex , rhododendron , and pine , out on to the bare hillsides ' slippery sunburnt grass , and back into the woodlands ' coolth again , till oak gave way to bamboo and palm of the valley , the lama swung untiring . Glancing back in the twilight at the huge ridges behind him and the faint , thin line of the road whereby they had come , he would lay out , with a hillman 's generous breadth of vision , fresh marches for the morrow ; or , halting in the neck of some uplifted pass that gave on Spiti and Kulu , would stretch out his hands yearningly towards the high snows of the horizon . In the dawns they flared windy-red above stark blue , as Kedarnath and Badrinath -- kings of that wilderness -- took the first sunlight . All day long they lay like molten silver under the sun , and at evening put on their jewels again .
At first they breathed temperately upon the travellers , winds good to meet when one crawled over some gigantic hog 's - back ; but in a few days , at a height of nine or ten thousand feet , those breezes bit ; and XXXXX kindly allowed a village of hillmen to acquire merit by giving him a rough blanket-coat .
Doon Kim bamboo bowsprit coolth first fulfils lama rice-field sapphire