On no account was Kim to part with them , for they belonged to a great piece of magic -- such magic as men practised over yonder behind the Museum , in the big blue-and-white Jadoo-Gher -- the Magic House , as we name the Masonic Lodge . It would , he said , all come right some day , and Kim 's horn would be exalted between pillars -- monstrous pillars -- of beauty and strength . The Colonel himself , riding on a horse , at the head of the finest Regiment in the world , would attend to Kim -- little Kim that should have been better off than his father . Nine hundred first-class devils , whose God was a Red Bull on a green field , would attend to Kim , if they had not forgotten O'Hara -- poor O'Hara that was gang-foreman on the Ferozepore line . Then he would weep bitterly in the broken rush chair on the veranda . So it came about after his death that the woman sewed parchment , paper , and birth-certificate into a leather amulet-case which she strung round Kim 's neck . ` And some day , ' she said , confusedly remembering O'Hara 's prophecies , ` there will come for you a great Red Bull on a green field , and the Colonel riding on his tall horse , yes , and ' dropping into English -- ` nine hundred devils . ' ` Ah , ' said Kim , ' I shall remember . A Red Bull and a Colonel on a horse will come , but first , my father said , will come the two men making ready the ground for these matters . That is how my father said they always did ; and it is always so when men work magic . ' If the woman had sent Kim up to the local Jadoo-Gher with those papers , he would , of course , have been taken over by the Provincial Lodge , and sent to the Masonic Orphanage in the Hills ; but what she had heard of magic she distrusted . Kim , too , held views of his own . As he reached the years of indiscretion , he learned to avoid missionaries and white men of serious aspect who asked who he was , and what he did . For Kim did nothing with an immense success . True , he knew the wonderful walled city of Lahore from the Delhi Gate to the outer Fort Ditch ; was hand in glove with men who led lives stranger than anything Haroun al Raschid dreamed of ; and he lived in a life wild as that of the Arabian Nights , but missionaries and secretaries of charitable societies could not see the beauty of it . His nickname through the wards was ` Little Friend of all the World ' ; and very often , being lithe and inconspicuous , he executed commissions by night on the crowded housetops for sleek and shiny young men of fashion . It was intrigue , -- of course he knew that much , as he had known all evil since he could speak , -- but what he loved was the game for its own sake -- the stealthy prowl through the dark gullies and lanes , the crawl up a waterpipe , the sights and sounds of the women 's world on the flat roofs , and the headlong flight from housetop to housetop under cover of the hot dark . Then there were holy men , ash-smeared fakirs by their brick shrines under the trees at the riverside , with whom he was quite familiar -- greeting them as they returned from begging-tours , and , when no one was by , eating from the same dish . The woman who looked after him insisted with tears that he should wear European clothes -- trousers , a shirt and a battered hat . Kim found it easier to slip into Hindu or Mohammedan garb when engaged on certain businesses .
One of the young men of fashion -- he who was found dead at the bottom of a well on the night of the earthquake -- had once given him a complete suit of XXXXX kit , the costume of a lowcaste street boy , and Kim stored it in a secret place under some baulks in Nila Ram 's timber-yard , beyond the Punjab High Court , where the fragrant deodar logs lie seasoning after they have driven down the Ravi .
English Hindu Jadoo-Gher Lahore O'Hara Red birth-certificate fakirs housetop housetops