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 Kim kindly allowed a village of hillmen to acquire merit by giving him a rough blanket-coat . The lama was mildly surprised that anyone should object to the knife-edged breezes which had cut the years off his shoulders . ` These are but the lower hills , chela . There is no cold till we come to the true Hills . ' ` Air and water are good , and the people are devout enough , but the food is very bad , ' Kim growled ; ` and we walk as though we were mad -- or English . It freezes at night , too . ' ' A little , maybe ; but only enough to make old bones rejoice in the sun . We must not always delight in soft beds and rich food . ' ` We might at least keep to the road . '
Kim had all a plainsman 's affection for the well-trodden track , not six feet wide , that snaked among the mountains ; but the XXXXX , being Tibetan , could not refrain from short cuts over spurs and the rims of gravel-strewn slopes .
Kedarnath Kim days deodar-forests evening lama night twilight woodlands years