prompt:
Chapter: Give the man who is not made
  To his trade
  Swords to fling and catch again,
  Coins to ring and snatch again,
  Men to harm and cure again,
  Snakes to charm and lure again--
  He'll be hurt by his own blade,
  By his serpents disobeyed,
  By his clumsiness bewrayed,'
  By the people mocked to scorn--
  So 'tis not with juggler born!
  Pinch of dust or withered flower,
  Chance-flung fruit or borrowed staff,
  Serve his need and shore his power,
  Bind the spell, or loose the laugh!
  But a man who, etc.

  The Juggler's Song, op. 15

Followed a sudden natural reaction.

'Now am I alone--all alone,' he thought.  'In all India is no one so
alone as I! If I die today, who shall bring the news--and to whom? If I
live and God is good, there will be a price upon my head, for I am a
Son of the Charm--I, Kim.'

A very few white people, but many Asiatics, can throw themselves into a
mazement as it were by repeating their own names over and over again to
themselves, letting the mind go free upon speculation as to what is
called personal identity.  When one grows older, the power, usually,
departs, but while it lasts it may descend upon a man at any moment.

'Who is Kim--Kim--Kim?'

He squatted in a corner of the clanging waiting-room, rapt from all
other thoughts; hands folded in lap, and pupils contracted to
pin-points.  In a minute--in another half-second--he felt he would
arrive at the solution of the tremendous puzzle; but here, as always
happens, his mind dropped away from those heights with a rush of a
wounded bird, and passing his hand before his eyes, he shook his head.

A long-haired Hindu bairagi [holy man], who had just bought a ticket,
halted before him at that moment and stared intently.

'I also have lost it,' he said sadly.  'It is one of the Gates to the
Way, but for me it has been shut many years.'

'What is the talk?'  said Kim, abashed.

'Thou wast wondering there in thy spirit what manner of thing thy soul
might be.  The seizure came of a sudden.  I know.  Who should know but
I? Whither goest thou?'

'Toward Kashi [Benares].'

'There are no Gods there.  I have proved them.  I go to Prayag
[Allahabad] for the fifth time--seeking the Road to Enlightenment. Of
what faith art thou?'

'I too am a Seeker,' said Kim, using one of the lama's pet words.
'Though'--he forgot his Northern dress for the moment--'though Allah
alone knoweth what I seek.'

The old fellow slipped the bairagi's crutch under his armpit and sat
down on a patch of ruddy leopard's skin as Kim rose at the call for the
Benares train.

'Go in hope, little brother,' he said.  'It is a long road to the feet
of the One; but thither do we all travel.'

Kim did not feel so lonely after this, and ere he had sat out twenty
miles in the crowded compartment, was cheering his neighbours with a
string of most wonderful yarns about his own and his master's magical
gifts.

Benares struck him as a peculiarly filthy city, though it was pleasant
to find how his cloth was respected.  At least one-third of the
population prays eternally to some group or other of the many million
deities, and so reveres every sort of holy man.  Kim was guided to the
Temple of the Tirthankars, about a mile outside the city, near Sarnath,
by a chance-met Punjabi farmer--a Kamboh from Jullundur-way who had
appealed in vain to every God of his homestead to cure his small son,
and was trying Benares as a last resort.

'Thou art from the North?'  he asked, shouldering through the press of
the narrow, stinking streets much like his own pet bull at home.

'Ay, I know the Punjab.  My mother was a pahareen, but my father came
from Amritzar--by Jandiala,' said Kim, oiling his ready tongue for the
needs of the Road.

'Jandiala--Jullundur?  Oho!  Then we be neighbours in some sort, as it
were.'  He nodded tenderly to the wailing child in his arms.  'Whom
dost thou serve?'

'A most holy man at the Temple of the Tirthankers.'

'They are all most holy and--most greedy,' said the Jat with
bitterness.  'I have walked the pillars and trodden the temples till my
feet are flayed, and the child is no whit better.  And the mother being
sick too ...  Hush, then, little one ...  We changed his name when the
fever came.  We put him into girl's clothes.  There was nothing we did
not do, except--I said to his mother when she bundled me off to
Benares--she should have come with me--I said Sakhi Sarwar Sultan would
serve us best.  We know His generosity, but these down-country Gods are
strangers.'

The child turned on the cushion of the huge corded arms and looked at
Kim through heavy eyelids.

'And was it all worthless?'  Kim asked, with easy interest.

'All worthless--all worthless,' said the child, lips cracking with
fever.

'The Gods have given him a good mind, at least' said the father
proudly.  'To think he should have listened so cleverly.  Yonder is thy
Temple.  Now I am a poor man--many priests have dealt with me--but my
son is my son, and if a gift to thy master can cure him--I am at my
very wits' end.'

Kim considered for a while, tingling with pride.  Three years ago he
would have made prompt profit on the situation and gone his way without
a thought; but now, the very respect the Jat paid him proved that he
was a man.  Moreover, he had tasted fever once or twice already, and
knew enough to recognize starvation when he saw it.

'Call him forth and I will give him a bond on my best yoke, so that the
child is cured.'

Kim halted at the carved outer door of the temple.  A white-clad Oswal
banker from Ajmir, his sins of usury new wiped out, asked him what he
did.

'I am chela to Teshoo Lama, an Holy One from Bhotiyal--within there. He
bade me come.  I wait.  Tell him.'

'Do not forget the child,' cried the importunate Jat over his shoulder,
and then bellowed in Punjabi; 'O Holy One--O disciple of the Holy
One--O Gods above all the Worlds--behold affliction sitting at the
gate!'  That cry is so common in Benares that the passers never turned
their heads.

The Oswal, at peace with mankind, carried the message into the darkness
behind him, and the easy, uncounted Eastern minutes slid by; for the
lama was asleep in his cell, and no priest would wake him.  When the
click of his rosary again broke the hush of the inner court where the
calm images of the Arhats stand, a novice whispered, 'Thy chela is
here,' and the old man strode forth, forgetting the end of that prayer.

Hardly had the tall figure shown in the doorway than the Jat ran before
him, and, lifting up the child, cried:  'Look upon this, Holy One; and
if the Gods will, he lives--he lives!'

He fumbled in his waist-belt and drew out a small silver coin.

'What is now?'  The lama's eyes turned to Kim.  It was noticeable he
spoke far clearer Urdu than long ago, under ZamZammah; but father would
allow no private talk.

'It is no more than a fever,' said Kim.  'The child is not well fed.'

'He sickens at everything, and his mother is not here.'

'If it be permitted, I may cure, Holy One.'

'What!  Have they made thee a healer?  Wait here,' said the lama, and
he sat down by the Jat upon the lowest step of the temple, while Kim,
looking out of the corner of his eyes, slowly opened the little
betel-box.  He had dreamed dreams at school of returning to the lama as
a Sahib--of chaffing the old man before he revealed himself--boy's
dreams all.  There was more drama in this abstracted, brow-puckered
search through the tabloid-bottles, with a pause here and there for
thought and a muttered invocation between whiles.  Quinine he had in
tablets, and dark brown meat-lozenges--beef most probably, but that was
not his business.  The little thing would not eat, but it sucked at a
lozenge greedily, and said it liked the salt taste.

'Take then these six.'  Kim handed them to the man.  'Praise the Gods,
and boil three in milk; other three in water.  After he has drunk the
milk give him this' (it was the half of a quinine pill), 'and wrap him
warm.  Give him the water of the other three, and the other half of
this white pill when he wakes.  Meantime, here is another brown
medicine that he may suck at on the way home.'

'Gods, what wisdom!'  said the Kamboh, snatching.

It was as much as Kim could remember of his own treatment in a bout of
autumn malaria--if you except the patter that he added to impress the
lama.

'Now go!  Come again in the morning.'

'But the price--the price,' said the Jat, and threw back his sturdy
shoulders.  'My son is my son.  Now that he will be whole again, how
shall I go back to his mother and say I took help by the wayside and
did not even give a bowl of curds in return?'

'They are alike, these Jats,' said Kim softly.  'The Jat stood on his
dunghill and the King's elephants went by.  "O driver," said he, "what
will you sell those little donkeys for?"'

The Jat burst into a roar of laughter, stifled with apologies to the
lama.  'It is the saying of my own country the very talk of it.  So are
we Jats all.  I will come tomorrow with the child; and the blessing of
the Gods of the Homesteads--who are good little Gods--be on you both
...  Now, son, we grow strong again.  Do not spit it out, little
Princeling!  King of my Heart, do not spit it out, and we shall be
strong men, wrestlers and club-wielders, by morning.'

He moved away, crooning and mumbling.  The lama turned to Kim, and all
the loving old soul of him looked out through his narrow eyes.

'To heal the sick is to acquire merit; but first one gets knowledge.
That was wisely done, O Friend of all the World.'

'I was made wise by thee, Holy One,' said Kim, forgetting the little
play just ended; forgetting St Xavier's; forgetting his white blood;
forgetting even the Great Game as he stooped, Mohammedan-fashion, to
touch his master's feet in the dust of the Jain temple.  'My teaching I
owe to thee.  I have eaten thy bread three years.  My time is finished.
I am loosed from the schools.  I come to thee.'

'Herein is my reward.  Enter!  Enter!  And is all well?'  They passed
to the inner court, where the afternoon sun sloped golden across.
'Stand that I may see.  So!'  He peered critically.  'It is no longer a
child, but a man, ripened in wisdom, walking as a physician.  I did
well--I did well when I gave thee up to the armed men on that black
night.  Dost thou remember our first day under Zam-Zammah?'

'Ay,' said Kim.  'Dost thou remember when I leapt off the carriage the
first day I went to--'

'The Gates of Learning?  Truly.  And the day that we ate the cakes
together at the back of the river by Nucklao.  Aha!  Many times hast
thou begged for me, but that day I begged for thee.'

'Good reason,' quoth Kim.  'I was then a scholar in the Gates of
Learning, and attired as a Sahib.  Do not forget, Holy One,' he went on
playfully.  'I am still a Sahib--by thy favour.'

'True.  And a Sahib in most high esteem.  Come to my cell, chela.'

'How is that known to thee?'

The lama smiled.  'First by means of letters from the kindly priest
whom we met in the camp of armed men; but he is now gone to his own
country, and I sent the money to his brother.'  Colonel Creighton, who
had succeeded to the trusteeship when Father Victor went to England
with the Mavericks, was hardly the Chaplain's brother.  'But I do not
well understand Sahibs' letters.  They must be interpreted to me.  I
chose a surer way.  Many times when I returned from my Search to this
Temple, which has always been a nest to me, there came one seeking
Enlightenment--a man from Leh--that had been, he said, a Hindu, but
wearied of all those Gods.'  The lama pointed to the Arhats.

'A fat man?'  said Kim, a twinkle in his eye.

'Very fat; but I perceived in a little his mind was wholly given up to
useless things--such as devils and charms and the form and fashion of
our tea-drinkings in the monasteries, and by what road we initiated the
novices.  A man abounding in questions; but he was a friend of thine,
chela.  He told me that thou wast on the road to much honour as a
scribe.  And I see thou art a physician.'

'Yes, that am I--a scribe, when I am a Sahib, but it is set aside when
I come as thy disciple.  I have accomplished the years appointed for a
Sahib.'

'As it were a novice?'  said the lama, nodding his head.  'Art thou
freed from the schools?  I would not have thee unripe.'

'I am all free.  In due time I take service under the Government as a
scribe--'

'Not as a warrior.  That is well.'

'But first I come to wander with thee.  Therefore I am here.  Who begs
for thee, these days?'  he went on quickly.  The ice was thin.

'Very often I beg myself; but, as thou knowest, I am seldom here,
except when I come to look again at my disciple.  From one end to
another of Hind have I travelled afoot and in the te-rain.  A great and
a wonderful land!  But here, when I put in, is as though I were in my
own Bhotiyal.'

He looked round the little clean cell complacently.  A low cushion gave
him a seat, on which he had disposed himself in the cross-legged
attitude of the Bodhisat emerging from meditation; a black teak-wood
table, not twenty inches high, set with copper tea-cups, was before
him.  In one corner stood a tiny altar, also of heavily carved teak,
bearing a copper-gilt image of the seated Buddha and fronted by a lamp,
an incense-holder, and a pair of copper flower-pots.

'The Keeper of the Images in the Wonder House acquired merit by giving
me these a year since,' he said, following Kim's eye.  'When one is far
from one's own land such things carry remembrance; and we must
reverence the Lord for that He showed the Way.  See!'  He pointed to a
curiously-built mound of coloured rice crowned with a fantastic metal
ornament.  'When I was Abbot in my own place--before I came to better
knowledge I made that offering daily.  It is the Sacrifice of the
Universe to the Lord.  Thus do we of Bhotiyal offer all the world daily
to the Excellent Law.  And I do it even now, though I know that the
Excellent One is beyond all pinchings and pattings.'  He snuffed from
his gourd.

'It is well done, Holy One,' Kim murmured, sinking at ease on the
cushions, very happy and rather tired.

'And also,' the old man chuckled, 'I write pictures of the Wheel of
Life.  Three days to a picture.  I was busied on it--or it may be I
shut my eyes a little--when they brought word of thee.  It is good to
have thee here:  I will show thee my art--not for pride's sake, but
because thou must learn.  The Sahibs have not all this world's wisdom.'

He drew from under the table a sheet of strangely scented yellow
Chinese paper, the brushes, and slab of Indian ink.  In cleanest,
severest outline he had traced the Great Wheel with its six spokes,
whose centre is the conjoined Hog, Snake, and Dove (Ignorance, Anger,
and Lust), and whose compartments are all the Heavens and Hells, and
all the chances of human life.  Men say that the Bodhisat Himself first
drew it with grains of rice upon dust, to teach His disciples the cause
of things.  Many ages have crystallized it into a most wonderful
convention crowded with hundreds of little figures whose every line
carries a meaning.  Few can translate the picture-parable; there are
not twenty in all the world who can draw it surely without a copy:  of
those who can both draw and expound are but three.

'I have a little learned to draw,' said Kim.  'But this is a marvel
beyond marvels.'

'I have written it for many years,' said the lama.  'Time was when I
could write it all between one lamp-lighting and the next.  I will
teach thee the art--after due preparation; and I will show thee the
meaning of the Wheel.'

'We take the Road, then?'

'The Road and our Search.  I was but waiting for thee.  It was made
plain to me in a hundred dreams--notably one that came upon the night
of the day that the Gates of Learning first shut that without thee I
should never find my River.  Again and again, as thou knowest, I put
this from me, fearing an illusion.  Therefore I would not take thee
with me that day at Lucknow, when we ate the cakes.  I would not take
thee till the time was ripe and auspicious.  From the Hills to the Sea,
from the Sea to the Hills have I gone, but it was vain. Then I
remembered the Tataka.'

He told Kim the story of the elephant with the leg-iron, as he had told
it so often to the Jam priests.

'Further testimony is not needed,' he ended serenely.  'Thou wast sent
for an aid.  That aid removed, my Search came to naught. Therefore we
will go out again together, and our Search sure.'

'Whither go we?'

'What matters, Friend of all the World?  The Search, I say, is sure. If
need be, the River will break from the ground before us.  I acquired
merit when I sent thee to the Gates of Learning, and gave thee the
jewel that is Wisdom.  Thou didst return, I saw even now, a follower of
Sakyamuni, the Physician, whose altars are many in Bhotiyal.  It is
sufficient.  We are together, and all things are as they were--Friend
of all the World--Friend of the Stars--my chela!'

Then they talked of matters secular; but it was noticeable that the
lama never demanded any details of life at St Xavier's, nor showed the
faintest curiosity as to the manners and customs of Sahibs.  His mind
moved all in the past, and he revived every step of their wonderful
first journey together, rubbing his hands and chuckling, till it
pleased him to curl himself up into the sudden sleep of old age.

Kim watched the last dusty sunshine fade out of the court, and played
with his ghost-dagger and rosary.  The clamour of Benares, oldest of
all earth's cities awake before the Gods, day and night, beat round the
walls as the sea's roar round a breakwater.  Now and again, a Jain
priest crossed the court, with some small offering to the images, and
swept the path about him lest by chance he should take the life of a
living thing.  A lamp twinkled, and there followed the sound of a
prayer.  Kim watched the stars as they rose one after another in the
still, sticky dark, till he fell asleep at the foot of the altar.  That
night he dreamed in Hindustani, with never an English word...

'Holy One, there is the child to whom we gave the medicine,' he said,
about three o'clock in the morning, when the lama, also waking from
dreams, would have fared forth on pilgrimage.  'The Jat will be here at
the light.'

'I am well answered.  In my haste I would have done a wrong.'  He sat
down on the cushions and returned to his rosary.  'Surely old folk are
as children,' he said pathetically.  'They desire a matter--behold, it
must be done at once, or they fret and weep!  Many times when I was
upon the Road I have been ready to stamp with my feet at the hindrance
of an ox-cart in the way, or a mere cloud of dust. It was not so when I
was a man--a long time ago.  None the less it is wrongful--'

'But thou art indeed old, Holy One.'

'The thing was done.  A Cause was put out into the world, and, old or
young, sick or sound, knowing or unknowing, who can rein in the effect
of that Cause?  Does the Wheel hang still if a child spin it--or a
drunkard?  Chela, this is a great and a terrible world.'

'I think it good,' Kim yawned.  'What is there to eat?  I have not
eaten since yesterday even.'

'I had forgotten thy need.  Yonder is good Bhotiyal tea and cold rice.'

'We cannot walk far on such stuff.'  Kim felt all the European's lust
for flesh-meat, which is not accessible in a Jain temple.  Yet, instead
of going out at once with the begging-bowl, he stayed his stomach on
slabs of cold rice till the full dawn.  It brought the farmer, voluble,
stuttering with gratitude.

'In the night the fever broke and the sweat came,' he cried.  'Feel
here--his skin is fresh and new!  He esteemed the salt lozenges, and
took milk with greed.'  He drew the cloth from the child's face, and it
smiled sleepily at Kim.  A little knot of Jain priests, silent but
all-observant, gathered by the temple door.  They knew, and Kim knew
that they knew, how the old lama had met his disciple.  Being courteous
folk, they had not obtruded themselves overnight by presence, word, or
gesture.  Wherefore Kim repaid them as the sun rose.

'Thank the Gods of the Jains, brother,' he said, not knowing how those
Gods were named.  'The fever is indeed broken.'

'Look!  See!'  The lama beamed in the background upon his hosts of
three years.  'Was there ever such a chela?  He follows our Lord the
Healer.'

Now the Jains officially recognize all the Gods of the Hindu creed, as
well as the Lingam and the Snake.  They wear the Brahminical thread;
they adhere to every claim of Hindu caste-law.  But, because they knew
and loved the lama, because he was an old man, because he sought the
Way, because he was their guest, and because he collogued long of
nights with the head-priest--as free-thinking a metaphysician as ever
split one hair into seventy--they murmured assent.

'Remember,'--Kim bent over the child--.  'this trouble may come again.'

'Not if thou hast the proper spell,' said the father.

'But in a little while we go away.'

'True,' said the lama to all the Jains.  'We go now together upon the
Search whereof I have often spoken.  I waited till my chela was ripe.
Behold him!  We go North.  Never again shall I look upon this place of
my rest, O people of good will.'

'But I am not a beggar.'  The cultivator rose to his feet, clutching
the child.

'Be still.  Do not trouble the Holy One,' a priest cried.

'Go,' Kim whispered.  'Meet us again under the big railway bridge, and
for the sake of all the Gods of our Punjab, bring food--curry, pulse,
cakes fried in fat, and sweetmeats.  Specially sweetmeats.  Be swift!'

The pallor of hunger suited Kim very well as he stood, tall and slim,
in his sand-coloured, sweeping robes, one hand on his rosary and the
other in the attitude of benediction, faithfully copied from the lama.
An English observer might have said that he looked rather like the
young saint of a stained-glass window, whereas he was but a growing lad
faint with emptiness.

Long and formal were the farewells, thrice ended and thrice renewed.
The Seeker--he who had invited the lama to that haven from far-away
Tibet, a silver-faced, hairless ascetic--took no part in it, but
meditated, as always, alone among the images.  The others were very
human; pressing small comforts upon the old man--a betel-box, a fine
new iron pencase, a food-bag, and such-like--warning him against the
dangers of the world without, and prophesying a happy end to the
Search.  Meantime Kim, lonelier than ever, squatted on the steps, and
swore to himself in the language of St Xavier's.

'But it is my own fault,' he concluded.  'With Mahbub, I ate Mahbub's
bread, or Lurgan Sahib's.  At St Xavier's, three meals a day.  Here I
must jolly-well look out for myself.  Besides, I am not in good
training.  How I could eat a plate of beef now!  ...  Is it finished,
Holy One?'

The lama, both hands raised, intoned a final blessing in ornate
Chinese.  'I must lean on thy shoulder,' said he, as the temple gates
closed.  'We grow stiff, I think.'

The weight of a six-foot man is not light to steady through miles of
crowded streets, and Kim, loaded down with bundles and packages for the
way, was glad to reach the shadow of the railway bridge.

'Here we eat,' he said resolutely, as the Kamboh, blue-robed and
smiling, hove in sight, a basket in one hand and the child in the other.

'Fall to, Holy Ones!'  he cried from fifty yards.  (They were by the
shoal under the first bridge-span, out of sight of hungry priests.)
'Rice and good curry, cakes all warm and well scented with hing
[asafoetida], curds and sugar.  King of my fields,'--this to the small
son--'let us show these holy men that we Jats of Jullundur can pay a
service ...  I had heard the Jains would eat nothing that they had not
cooked, but truly'--he looked away politely over the broad
river--'where there is no eye there is no caste.'

'And we,' said Kim, turning his back and heaping a leafplatter for the
lama, 'are beyond all castes.'

They gorged themselves on the good food in silence.  Nor till he had
licked the last of the sticky sweetstuff from his little finger did Kim
note that the Kamboh too was girt for travel.

'If our roads lie together,' he said roughly, 'I go with thee.  One
does not often find a worker of miracles, and the child is still weak.
But I am not altogether a reed.'  He picked up his lathi--a five-foot
male-bamboo ringed with bands of polished iron--and flourished it in
the air.  'The Jats are called quarrel-some, but that is not true.
Except when we are crossed, we are like our own buffaloes.'

'So be it,' said Kim.  'A good stick is a good reason.'

The lama gazed placidly up-stream, where in long, smudged perspective
the ceaseless columns of smoke go up from the burning-ghats by the
river.  Now and again, despite all municipal regulations, the fragment
of a half-burned body bobbed by on the full current.

'But for thee,' said the Kamboh to Kim, drawing the child into his
hairy breast, 'I might today have gone thither--with this one.  The
priests tell us that Benares is holy--which none doubt--and desirable
to die in.  But I do not know their Gods, and they ask for money; and
when one has done one worship a shaved-head vows it is of none effect
except one do another.  Wash here!  Wash there!  Pour, drink, lave, and
scatter flowers--but always pay the priests.  No, the Punjab for me,
and the soil of the Jullundur-doab for the best soil in it.'

'I have said many times--in the Temple, I think--that if need be, the
River will open at our feet.  We will therefore go North,' said the
lama, rising.  'I remember a pleasant place, set about with
fruit-trees, where one can walk in meditation--and the air is cooler
there.  It comes from the Hills and the snow of the Hills.'

'What is the name?'  said Kim.

'How should I know?  Didst thou not--no, that was after the Army rose
out of the earth and took thee away.  I abode there in meditation in a
room against the dovecot--except when she talked eternally.'

'Oho!  the woman from Kulu.  That is by Saharunpore.'  Kim laughed.

'How does the spirit move thy master?  Does he go afoot, for the sake
of past sins?'  the Jat demanded cautiously.  'It is a far cry to
Delhi.'

'No,' said Kim.  'I will beg a tikkut for the te-rain.'  One does not
own to the possession of money in India.

'Then, in the name of the Gods, let us take the fire-carriage.  My son
is best in his mother's arms.  The Government has brought on us many
taxes, but it gives us one good thing--the te-rain that joins friends
and unites the anxious.  A wonderful matter is the te-rain.'

They all piled into it a couple of hours later, and slept through the
heat of the day.  The Kamboh plied Kim with ten thousand questions as
to the lama's walk and work in life, and received some curious answers.
Kim was content to be where he was, to look out upon the flat
North-Western landscape, and to talk to the changing mob of
fellow-passengers.  Even today, tickets and ticket-clipping are dark
oppression to Indian rustics.  They do not understand why, when they
have paid for a magic piece of paper, strangers should punch great
pieces out of the charm.  So, long and furious are the debates between
travellers and Eurasian ticket-collectors.  Kim assisted at two or
three with grave advice, meant to darken counsel and to show off his
wisdom before the lama and the admiring Kamboh.  But at Somna Road the
Fates sent him a matter to think upon.  There tumbled into the
compartment, as the train was moving off, a mean, lean little person--a
Mahratta, so far as Kim could judge by the cock of the tight turban.
His face was cut, his muslin upper-garment was badly torn, and one leg
was bandaged.  He told them that a country-cart had upset and nearly
slain him:  he was going to Delhi, where his son lived.  Kim watched
him closely. If, as he asserted, he had been rolled over and over on
the earth, there should have been signs of gravel-rash on the skin.
But all his injuries seemed clean cuts, and a mere fall from a cart
could not cast a man into such extremity of terror.  As, with shaking
fingers, he knotted up the torn cloth about his neck he laid bare an
amulet of the kind called a keeper-up of the heart.  Now, amulets are
common enough, but they are not generally strung on square-plaited
copper wire, and still fewer amulets bear black enamel on silver.
There were none except the Kamboh and the lama in the compartment,
which, luckily, was of an old type with solid ends.  Kim made as to
scratch in his bosom, and thereby lifted his own amulet.  The
Mahratta's face changed altogether at the sight, and he disposed the
amulet fairly on his breast.

'Yes,' he went on to the Kamboh, 'I was in haste, and the cart, driven
by a bastard, bound its wheel in a water-cut, and besides the harm done
to me there was lost a full dish of tarkeean.  I was not a Son of the
Charm [a lucky man] that day.'

'That was a great loss,' said the Kamboh, withdrawing interest.  His
experience of Benares had made him suspicious.

'Who cooked it?'  said Kim.

'A woman.'  The Mahratta raised his eyes.

'But all women can cook tarkeean,' said the Kamboh.  'It is a good
curry, as I know.'

'Oh yes, it is a good curry,' said the Mahratta.

'And cheap,' said Kim.  'But what about caste?'

'Oh, there is no caste where men go to--look for tarkeean,' the
Mahratta replied, in the prescribed cadence.  'Of whose service art
thou?'

'Of the service of this Holy One.'  Kim pointed to the happy, drowsy
lama, who woke with a jerk at the well-loved word.

'Ah, he was sent from Heaven to aid me.  He is called the Friend of all
the World.  He is also called the Friend of the Stars.  He walks as a
physician--his time being ripe.  Great is his wisdom.'

'And a Son of the Charm,' said Kim under his breath, as the Kamboh made
haste to prepare a pipe lest the Mahratta should beg.

'And who is that?'  the Mahratta asked, glancing sideways nervously.

'One whose child I--we have cured, who lies under great debt to us. Sit
by the window, man from Jullundur.  Here is a sick one.'

'Humph!  I have no desire to mix with chance-met wastrels.  My ears are
not long.  I am not a woman wishing to overhear secrets.'  The Jat slid
himself heavily into a far corner.

'Art thou anything of a healer?  I am ten leagues deep in calamity,'
cried the Mahratta, picking up the cue.

'This man is cut and bruised all over.  I go about to cure him,' Kim
retorted.  'None interfered between thy babe and me.'

'I am rebuked,' said the Kamboh meekly.  'I am thy debtor for the life
of my son.  Thou art a miracle-worker--I know it.'

'Show me the cuts.'  Kim bent over the Mahratta's neck, his heart
nearly choking him; for this was the Great Game with a vengeance. 'Now,
tell thy tale swiftly, brother, while I say a charm.'

'I come from the South, where my work lay.  One of us they slew by the
roadside.  Hast thou heard?'  Kim shook his head.  He, of course, knew
nothing of E's predecessor, slain down South in the habit of an Arab
trader.  'Having found a certain letter which I was sent to seek, I
came away.  I escaped from the city and ran to Mhow.  So sure was I
that none knew, I did not change my face.  At Mhow a woman brought
charge against me of theft of jewellery in that city which I had left.
Then I saw the cry was out against me.  I ran from Mhow by night,
bribing the police, who had been bribed to hand me over without
question to my enemies in the South.  Then I lay in old Chitor city a
week, a penitent in a temple, but I could not get rid of the letter
which was my charge.  I buried it under the Queen's Stone, at Chitor,
in the place known to us all.'

Kim did not know, but not for worlds would he have broken the thread.

'At Chitor, look you, I was all in Kings' country; for Kotah to the
east is beyond the Queen's law, and east again lie Jaipur and Gwalior.
Neither love spies, and there is no justice.  I was hunted like a wet
jackal; but I broke through at Bandakui, where I heard there was a
charge against me of murder in the city I had left--of the murder of a
boy.  They have both the corpse and the witnesses waiting.'

'But cannot the Government protect?'

'We of the Game are beyond protection.  If we die, we die.  Our names
are blotted from the book.  That is all.  At Bandakui, where lives one
of Us, I thought to slip the scent by changing my face, and so made me
a Mahratta.  Then I came to Agra, and would have turned back to Chitor
to recover the letter.  So sure I was I had slipped them. Therefore I
did not send a tar [telegram] to any one saying where the letter lay.
I wished the credit of it all.'

Kim nodded.  He understood that feeling well.

'But at Agra, walking in the streets, a man cried a debt against me,
and approaching with many witnesses, would hale me to the courts then
and there.  Oh, they are clever in the South!  He recognized me as his
agent for cotton.  May he burn in Hell for it!'

'And wast thou?'

'O fool!  I was the man they sought for the matter of the letter!  I
ran into the Fleshers' Ward and came out by the House of the Jew, who
feared a riot and pushed me forth.  I came afoot to Somna Road--I had
only money for my tikkut to Delhi--and there, while I lay in a ditch
with a fever, one sprang out of the bushes and beat me and cut me and
searched me from head to foot.  Within earshot of the terain it was!'

'Why did he not slay thee out of hand?'

'They are not so foolish.  If I am taken in Delhi at the instance of
lawyers, upon a proven charge of murder, my body is handed over to the
State that desires it.  I go back guarded, and then--I die slowly for
an example to the rest of Us.  The South is not my country.  I run in
circles--like a goat with one eye.  I have not eaten for two days.  I
am marked'--he touched the filthy bandage on his leg--'so that they
will know me at Delhi.'

'Thou art safe in the te-rain, at least.'

'Live a year at the Great Game and tell me that again!  The wires will
be out against me at Delhi, describing every tear and rag upon me.
Twenty--a hundred, if need be--will have seen me slay that boy.  And
thou art useless!'

Kim knew enough of native methods of attack not to doubt that the case
would be deadly complete--even to the corpse.  The Mahratta twitched
his fingers with pain from time to time.  The Kamboh in his corner
glared sullenly; the lama was busy over his beads; and Kim, fumbling
doctor-fashion at the man's neck, thought out his plan between
invocations.

'Hast thou a charm to change my shape?  Else I am dead.  Five--ten
minutes alone, if I had not been so pressed, and I might--'

'Is he cured yet, miracle-worker?'  said the Kamboh jealously.  'Thou
hast chanted long enough.'

'Nay.  There is no cure for his hurts, as I see, except he sit for
three days in the habit of a bairagi.'  This is a common penance, often
imposed on a fat trader by his spiritual teacher.

'One priest always goes about to make another priest,' was the retort.
Like most grossly superstitious folk, the Kamboh could not keep his
tongue from deriding his Church.

'Will thy son be a priest, then?  It is time he took more of my
quinine.'

'We Jats are all buffaloes,' said the Kamboh, softening anew.

Kim rubbed a finger-tip of bitterness on the child's trusting little
lips.  'I have asked for nothing,' he said sternly to the father,
'except food.  Dost thou grudge me that?  I go to heal another man.
Have I thy leave--Prince?'

Up flew the man's huge paws in supplication.  'Nay--nay.  Do not mock
me thus.'

'It pleases me to cure this sick one.  Thou shalt acquire merit by
aiding.  What colour ash is there in thy pipe-bowl?  White.  That is
auspicious.  Was there raw turmeric among thy foodstuffs?'

'I--I--'

'Open thy bundle!'

It was the usual collection of small oddments:  bits of cloth, quack
medicines, cheap fairings, a clothful of atta--greyish, rough-ground
native flour--twists of down-country tobacco, tawdry pipe-stems, and a
packet of curry-stuff, all wrapped in a quilt.  Kim turned it over with
the air of a wise warlock, muttering a Mohammedan invocation.

'This is wisdom I learned from the Sahibs,' he whispered to the lama;
and here, when one thinks of his training at Lurgan's, he spoke no more
than the truth.  'There is a great evil in this man's fortune, as shown
by the Stars, which--which troubles him.  Shall I take it away?'

'Friend of the Stars, thou hast done well in all things.  Let it be at
thy pleasure.  Is it another healing?'

'Quick!  Be quick!'  gasped the Mahratta.  'The train may stop.'

'A healing against the shadow of death,' said Kim, mixing the Kamboh's
flour with the mingled charcoal and tobacco ash in the red-earth bowl
of the pipe.  E, without a word, slipped off his turban and shook down
his long black hair.

'That is my food--priest,' the jat growled.

'A buffalo in the temple!  Hast thou dared to look even thus far?' said
Kim.  'I must do mysteries before fools; but have a care for thine
eyes.  Is there a film before them already?  I save the babe, and for
return thou--oh, shameless!'  The man flinched at the direct gaze, for
Kim was wholly in earnest.

'Shall I curse thee, or shall I--' He picked up the outer cloth of the
bundle and threw it over the bowed head.  'Dare so much as to think a
wish to see, and--and--even I cannot save thee.  Sit!  Be dumb!'

'I am blind--dumb.  Forbear to curse!  Co--come, child; we will play a
game of hiding.  Do not, for my sake, look from under the cloth.'

'I see hope,' said E23.  'What is thy scheme?'

'This comes next,' said Kim, plucking the thin body-shirt.  E23
hesitated, with all a North-West man's dislike of baring his body.

'What is caste to a cut throat?'  said Kim, rending it to the waist.
'We must make thee a yellow Saddhu all over.  Strip--strip swiftly, and
shake thy hair over thine eyes while I scatter the ash. Now, a
caste-mark on thy forehead.'  He drew from his bosom the little Survey
paint-box and a cake of crimson lake.

'Art thou only a beginner?'  said E23, labouring literally for the dear
life, as he slid out of his body-wrappings and stood clear in the
loin-cloth while Kim splashed in a noble caste-mark on the ash-smeared
brow.

'But two days entered to the Game, brother,' Kim replied.  'Smear more
ash on the bosom.'

'Hast thou met--a physician of sick pearls?'  He switched out his long,
tight-rolled turban-cloth and, with swiftest hands, rolled it over and
under about his loins into the intricate devices of a Saddhu's cincture.

'Hah!  Dost thou know his touch, then?  He was my teacher for a while.
We must bar thy legs.  Ash cures wounds.  Smear it again.'

'I was his pride once, but thou art almost better.  The Gods are kind
to us!  Give me that.'

It was a tin box of opium pills among the rubbish of the Jat's bundle.
E23 gulped down a half handful.  'They are good against hunger, fear,
and chill.  And they make the eyes red too,' he explained.  'Now I
shall have heart to play the Game.  We lack only a Saddhu's tongs.
What of the old clothes?'

Kim rolled them small, and stuffed them into the slack folds of his
tunic.  With a yellow-ochre paint cake he smeared the legs and the
breast, great streaks against the background of flour, ash, and
turmeric.

'The blood on them is enough to hang thee, brother.'

'Maybe; but no need to throw them out of the window ...  It is
finished.'  His voice thrilled with a boy's pure delight in the Game.
'Turn and look, O Jat!'

'The Gods protect us,' said the hooded Kamboh, emerging like a buffalo
from the reeds.  'But--whither went the Mahratta?  What hast thou done?'

Kim had been trained by Lurgan Sahib; E23, by virtue of his business,
was no bad actor.  In place of the tremulous, shrinking trader there
lolled against the corner an all but naked, ash-smeared, ochre-barred,
dusty-haired Saddhu, his swollen eyes--opium takes quick effect on an
empty stomach--luminous with insolence and bestial lust, his legs
crossed under him, Kim's brown rosary round his neck, and a scant yard
of worn, flowered chintz on his shoulders.  The child buried his face
in his amazed father's arms.

'Look up, Princeling!  We travel with warlocks, but they will not hurt
thee.  Oh, do not cry ...  What is the sense of curing a child one day
and killing him with fright the next?'

'The child will be fortunate all his life.  He has seen a great
healing.  When I was a child I made clay men and horses.'

'I have made them too.  Sir Banas, he comes in the night and makes them
all alive at the back of our kitchen-midden,' piped the child.

'And so thou art not frightened at anything.  Eh, Prince?'

'I was frightened because my father was frightened.  I felt his arms
shake.'

'Oh, chicken-man!'  said Kim, and even the abashed Jat laughed.  'I
have done a healing on this poor trader.  He must forsake his gains and
his account-books, and sit by the wayside three nights to overcome the
malignity of his enemies.  The Stars are against him.'

'The fewer money-lenders the better, say I; but, Saddhu or no Saddhu,
he should pay for my stuff on his shoulders.'

'So?  But that is thy child on thy shoulder--given over to the
burning-ghat not two days ago.  There remains one thing more.  I did
this charm in thy presence because need was great.  I changed his shape
and his soul.  None the less, if, by any chance, O man from Jullundur,
thou rememberest what thou hast seen, either among the elders sitting
under the village tree, or in thine own house, or in company of thy
priest when he blesses thy cattle, a murrain will come among the
buffaloes, and a fire in thy thatch, and rats in the corn-bins, and the
curse of our Gods upon thy fields that they may be barren before thy
feet and after thy ploughshare.' This was part of an old curse picked
up from a fakir by the Taksali Gate in the days of Kim's innocence.  It
lost nothing by repetition.

'Cease, Holy One!  In mercy, cease!'  cried the Jat.  'Do not curse the
household.  I saw nothing!  I heard nothing!  I am thy cow!'  and he
made to grab at Kim's bare foot beating rhythmically on the carriage
floor.  'But since thou hast been permitted to aid me in the matter of
a pinch of flour and a little opium and such trifles as I have honoured
by using in my art, so will the Gods return a blessing,' and he gave it
at length, to the man's immense relief.  It was one that he had learned
from Lurgan Sahib.

The lama stared through his spectacles as he had not stared at the
business of disguisement.  'Friend of the Stars,' he said at last,
'thou hast acquired great wisdom.  Beware that it do not give birth to
pride.  No man having the Law before his eyes speaks hastily of any
matter which he has seen or encountered.'

'No--no--no, indeed,' cried the farmer, fearful lest the master should
be minded to improve on the pupil.  E23, with relaxed mouth, gave
himself up to the opium that is meat, tobacco, and medicine to the
spent Asiatic.

So, in a silence of awe and great miscomprehension, they slid into
Delhi about lamp-lighting time.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: As Kim sits in his disguise at the Benares train station, he feels alone in the world and wonders, "Who is Kim--Kim--Kim?" A Hindu holy man approaches Kim and he tells him that he is having a spiritual crisis. The holy man sympathizes: he has been looking for Enlightenment for years. The holy man assures Kim that we are all in the same boat, trying to figure out life and our place in it. This thought cheers Kim up, and he drops the emo act and returns to his usual self. There is a Punjabi farmer outside the Jain temple where the lama is staying. He has a sick child with him. The farmer complains to Kim that he has been to every kind of priest, and none of them have been able to help his ailing son. He is almost out of money, but he will do what he can if Kim's lama can cure his son. Kim goes into the Jain temple to find his lama. The two of them go out together to the Punjabi farmer and his son, where Kim pulls out that medicine box he got from the Babu way back in Chapter 9. It's stocked with quinine pills and beef bouillon cubes . Kim recognizes that, yes, the kid has a fever, but the real problem is that he is malnourished. So Kim gives the boy a cube of beef bouillon to suck on . He also gives the father six cubes to boil up in water or milk. And he hands over a quinine pill. Kim tells the Punjabi farmer to come back the next day with his son, who should be fine now that he has food and medicine. The lama is deeply impressed by how much Kim has learned. But he isn't totally surprised--it turns out the lama has been keeping track of Kim, first through letters from Father Victor, and then through direct news from the Babu. The lama is glad to see that Kim is ready, because the time has come: they need to set out once again to search for the River of the Arrow. They wait until the next morning to see what news the Punjabi father brings of his son's health. The son is much better, and the lama brags about Kim's mad skillz in healing to the watching Jain monks. Kim offers the Punjabi farmer more medicine in case the sickness comes back--but this time, he has to pay with food. At this temple, Kim has to eat lightly, and it's all vegetarian. He's starving, and he can barely wait while the lama finishes saying goodbye to all the monks. Finally, they go to meet the Punjabi farmer, who is waiting with tons of food. They all pig out. Kim and the lama plan to board the train and head back up to the house of that Kulu woman from Chapter 4. The Punjabi farmer is also going that way, so he will travel with them for a bit. While they are riding the train north, something weird happens: A roughed-up Mahratta man comes into their train car, and Kim spots that this man has the same kind of silver amulet that Kim is wearing around his own neck. There's no one in the car except for the lama, Kim, the Punjabi farmer, and his son. So Kim takes a chance and displays his silver amulet. The Mahratta man notices it and drops a reference to the "Son of the Charm" in his next sentence. When the lama starts boasting to the Mahratta about Kim as the "Friend of all the World" , Kim jumps in to say that he is also a "Son of the Charm" . So now Kim knows that the Mahratta man is also an employee of the British Secret Service. The two of them talk together quietly, while Kim pretends to be looking at the man's wounds. The Mahratta is on the run from his enemies in the south, who have chased him from city to city--he has been so closely chased that he hasn't been able to deliver the secret letter that was his job. The Mahratta is sure that, as soon as the train reaches the city of Delhi in about five or ten minutes, he's done for. Kim decides to dress the guy up as a holy man, a Saddhu . He makes the man strip down to his loin cloth, covers the man in ash , and uses some of the red and yellow paints from his medicine box to add to the disguise. And voila--thanks to Kim's skill with disguise, where there once was a Mahratta, now there is a Hindu Saddhu. The agent, E23, is impressed with Kim's skills; he also recognizes the signs of Lurgan's training. The agent gulps down some opium pills to look authentically out of it and in a trance. The Punjabi farmer and the child think that Kim has actually taken up shape-shifting and magic. The Punjabi farmer also swears that he has seen nothing--not only is he grateful to Kim, but he is also afraid of him.


prompt:
Chapter: Who hath desired the Sea--the sight of salt-water unbounded?
  The heave and the halt and the hurl and the crash of the comber
      wind-hounded?
  The sleek-barrelled swell before storm--grey, foamless, enormous,
      and growing?
  Stark calm on the lap of the Line--or the crazy-eyed hurricane
      blowing?
  His Sea in no showing the same--his Sea and the same 'neath all
      showing--
  His Sea that his being fulfils?
  So and no otherwise--so and no otherwise hill-men desire their Hills!

  The Sea and the Hills.

'I have found my heart again,' said E23, under cover of the platform's
tumult.  'Hunger and fear make men dazed, or I might have thought of
this escape before.  I was right.  They come to hunt for me.  Thou hast
saved my head.'

A group of yellow-trousered Punjab policemen, headed by a hot and
perspiring young Englishman, parted the crowd about the carriages.
Behind them, inconspicuous as a cat, ambled a small fat person who
looked like a lawyer's tout.

'See the young Sahib reading from a paper.  My description is in his
hand,' said E23.  'Thev go carriage by carriage, like fisher-folk
netting a pool.'

When the procession reached their compartment, E23 was counting his
beads with a steady jerk of the wrist; while Kim jeered at him for
being so drugged as to have lost the ringed fire-tongs which are the
Saddhu's distinguishing mark.  The lama, deep in meditation, stared
straight before him; and the farmer, glancing furtively, gathered up
his belongings.

'Nothing here but a parcel of holy-bolies,' said the Englishman aloud,
and passed on amid a ripple of uneasiness; for native police mean
extortion to the native all India over.

'The trouble now,' whispered E23, 'lies in sending a wire as to the
place where I hid that letter I was sent to find.  I cannot go to the
tar-office in this guise.'

'Is it not enough I have saved thy neck?'

'Not if the work be left unfinished.  Did never the healer of sick
pearls tell thee so?  Comes another Sahib!  Ah!'

This was a tallish, sallowish District Superintendent of Police--belt,
helmet, polished spurs and all--strutting and twirling his dark
moustache.

'What fools are these Police Sahibs!'  said Kim genially.

E23 glanced up under his eyelids.  'It is well said,' he muttered in a
changed voice.  'I go to drink water.  Keep my place.'

He blundered out almost into the Englishman's arms, and was bad-worded
in clumsy Urdu.

'Tum mut?  You drunk?  You mustn't bang about as though Delhi station
belonged to you, my friend.'

E23, not moving a muscle of his countenance, answered with a stream of
the filthiest abuse, at which Kim naturally rejoiced.  It reminded him
of the drummer-boys and the barrack-sweepers at Umballa in the terrible
time of his first schooling.

'My good fool,' the Englishman drawled.  'Nickle-jao!  Go back to your
carriage.'

Step by step, withdrawing deferentially and dropping his voice, the
yellow Saddhu clomb back to the carriage, cursing the D.S.P. to
remotest posterity, by--here Kim almost jumped--by the curse of the
Queen's Stone, by the writing under the Queen's Stone, and by an
assortment of Gods with wholly, new names.

'I don't know what you're saying,'--the Englishman flushed
angrily--'but it's some piece of blasted impertinence.  Come out of
that!'

E23, affecting to misunderstand, gravely produced his ticket, which the
Englishman wrenched angrily from his hand.

'Oh, zoolum!  What oppression!'  growled the Jat from his corner. 'All
for the sake of a jest too.'  He had been grinning at the freedom of
the Saddhu's tongue.  'Thy charms do not work well today, Holy One!'

The Saddhu followed the policeman, fawning and supplicating.  The ruck
of passengers, busy, with their babies and their bundles, had not
noticed the affair.  Kim slipped out behind him; for it flashed through
his head that he had heard this angry, stupid Sahib discoursing loud
personalities to an old lady near Umballa three years ago.

'It is well', the Saddhu whispered, jammed in the calling, shouting,
bewildered press--a Persian greyhound between his feet and a cageful of
yelling hawks under charge of a Rajput falconer in the small of his
back.  'He has gone now to send word of the letter which I hid.  They
told me he was in Peshawur.  I might have known that he is like the
crocodile--always at the other ford.  He has saved me from present
calamity, but I owe my life to thee.'

'Is he also one of Us?'  Kim ducked under a Mewar camel-driver's greasy
armpit and cannoned off a covey of jabbering Sikh matrons.

'Not less than the greatest.  We are both fortunate!  I will make
report to him of what thou hast done.  I am safe under his protection.'

He bored through the edge of the crowd besieging the carriages, and
squatted by the bench near the telegraph-office.

'Return, or they take thy place!  Have no fear for the work,
brother--or my life.  Thou hast given me breathing-space, and
Strickland Sahib has pulled me to land.  We may work together at the
Game yet. Farewell!'

Kim hurried to his carriage:  elated, bewildered, but a little nettled
in that he had no key to the secrets about him.

'I am only a beginner at the Game, that is sure.  I could not have
leaped into safety as did the Saddhu.  He knew it was darkest under the
lamp.  I could not have thought to tell news under pretence of cursing
...  and how clever was the Sahib!  No matter, I saved the life of one
...  Where is the Kamboh gone, Holy One?'  he whispered, as he took his
seat in the now crowded compartment.

'A fear gripped him,' the lama replied, with a touch of tender malice.
'He saw thee change the Mahratta to a Saddhu in the twinkling of an
eye, as a protection against evil.  That shook him. Then he saw the
Saddhu fall sheer into the hands of the polis--all the effect of thy
art.  Then he gathered up his son and fled; for he said that thou didst
change a quiet trader into an impudent bandier of words with the
Sahibs, and he feared a like fate.  Where is the Saddhu?'

'With the polis,' said Kim ...  'Yet I saved the Kamboh's child.'

The lama snuffed blandly.

'Ah, chela, see how thou art overtaken!  Thou didst cure the Kamboh's
child solely to acquire merit.  But thou didst put a spell on the
Mahratta with prideful workings--I watched thee--and with sidelong
glances to bewilder an old old man and a foolish farmer: whence
calamity and suspicion.'

Kim controlled himself with an effort beyond his years.  Not more than
any other youngster did he like to eat dirt or to be misjudged, but he
saw himself in a cleft stick.  The train rolled out of Delhi into the
night.

'It is true,' he murmured.  'Where I have offended thee I have done
wrong.'

'It is more, chela.  Thou hast loosed an Act upon the world, and as a
stone thrown into a pool so spread the consequences thou canst not tell
how far.'

This ignorance was well both for Kim's vanity and for the lama's peace
of mind, when we think that there was then being handed in at Simla a
code-wire reporting the arrival of E23 at Delhi, and, more important,
the whereabouts of a letter he had been commissioned to--abstract.
Incidentally, an over-zealous policeman had arrested, on charge of
murder done in a far southern State, a horribly indignant Ajmir
cotton-broker, who was explaining himself to a Mr Strickland on Delhi
platform, while E23 was paddling through byways into the locked heart
of Delhi city.  In two hours several telegrams had reached the angry
minister of a southern State reporting that all trace of a somewhat
bruised Mahratta had been lost; and by the time the leisurely train
halted at Saharunpore the last ripple of the stone Kim had helped to
heave was lapping against the steps of a mosque in far-away Roum--where
it disturbed a pious man at prayers.

The lama made his in ample form near the dewy bougainvillea-trellis
near the platform, cheered by the clear sunshine and the presence of
his disciple.  'We will put these things behind us,' he said,
indicating the brazen engine and the gleaming track.  'The jolting of
the te-rain--though a wonderful thing--has turned my bones to water.
We will use clean air henceforward.'

'Let us go to the Kulu woman's house' said Kim, and stepped forth
cheerily under the bundles.  Early morning Saharunpore-way is clean and
well scented.  He thought of the other mornings at St Xavier's, and it
topped his already thrice-heaped contentment.

'Where is this new haste born from?  Wise men do not run about like
chickens in the sun.  We have come hundreds upon hundreds of koss
already, and, till now, I have scarcely been alone with thee an
instant.  How canst thou receive instruction all jostled of crowds? How
can I, whelmed by a flux of talk, meditate upon the Way?'

'Her tongue grows no shorter with the years, then?'  the disciple
smiled.

'Nor her desire for charms.  I remember once when I spoke of the Wheel
of Life'--the lama fumbled in his bosom for his latest copy--'she was
only curious about the devils that besiege children.  She shall acquire
merit by entertaining us--in a little while--at an
after-occasion--softly, softly.  Now we will wander loose-foot, waiting
upon the Chain of Things.  The Search is sure.'

So they travelled very easily across and among the broad bloomful
fruit-gardens--by way of Aminabad, Sahaigunge, Akrola of the Ford, and
little Phulesa--the line of the Siwaliks always to the north, and
behind them again the snows.  After long, sweet sleep under the dry
stars came the lordly, leisurely passage through a waking
village--begging-bowl held forth in silence, but eyes roving in
defiance of the Law from sky's edge to sky's edge.  Then would Kim
return soft-footed through the soft dust to his master under the shadow
of a mango-tree or the thinner shade of a white Doon siris, to eat and
drink at ease.  At mid-day, after talk and a little wayfaring, they
slept; meeting the world refreshed when the air was cooler.  Night
found them adventuring into new territory--some chosen village spied
three hours before across the fat land, and much discussed upon the
road.

There they told their tale--a new one each evening so far as Kim was
concerned--and there were they made welcome, either by priest or
headman, after the custom of the kindly East.

When the shadows shortened and the lama leaned more heavily upon Kim,
there was always the Wheel of Life to draw forth, to hold flat under
wiped stones, and with a long straw to expound cycle by cycle. Here sat
the Gods on high--and they were dreams of dreams.  Here was our Heaven
and the world of the demi-Gods--horsemen fighting among the hills.
Here were the agonies done upon the beasts, souls ascending or
descending the ladder and therefore not to be interfered with.  Here
were the Hells, hot and cold, and the abodes of tormented ghosts.  Let
the chela study the troubles that come from over-eating--bloated
stomach and burning bowels.  Obediently, then, with bowed head and
brown finger alert to follow the pointer, did the chela study; but when
they came to the Human World, busy and profitless, that is just above
the Hells, his mind was distracted; for by the roadside trundled the
very Wheel itself, eating, drinking, trading, marrying, and
quarrelling--all warmly alive. Often the lama made the living pictures
the matter of his text, bidding Kim--too ready--note how the flesh
takes a thousand shapes, desirable or detestable as men reckon, but in
truth of no account either way; and how the stupid spirit, bond-slave
to the Hog, the Dove, and the Serpent--lusting after betel-nut, a new
yoke of oxen, women, or the favour of kings--is bound to follow the
body through all the Heavens and all the Hells, and strictly round
again. Sometimes a woman or a poor man, watching the ritual--it was
nothing less--when the great yellow chart was unfolded, would throw a
few flowers or a handful of cowries upon its edge.  It sufficed these
humble ones that they had met a Holy One who might be moved to remember
them in his prayers.

'Cure them if they are sick,' said the lama, when Kim's sporting
instincts woke.  'Cure them if they have fever, but by no means work
charms.  Remember what befell the Mahratta.'

'Then all Doing is evil?'  Kim replied, lying out under a big tree at
the fork of the Doon road, watching the little ants run over his hand.

'To abstain from action is well--except to acquire merit.'

'At the Gates of Learning we were taught that to abstain from action
was unbefitting a Sahib.  And I am a Sahib.'

'Friend of all the World,'--the lama looked directly at Kim--'I am an
old man--pleased with shows as are children.  To those who follow the
Way there is neither black nor white, Hind nor Bhotiyal. We be all
souls seeking escape.  No matter what thy wisdom learned among Sahibs,
when we come to my River thou wilt be freed from all illusion--at my
side.  Hai!  My bones ache for that River, as they ached in the
te-rain; but my spirit sits above my bones, waiting. The Search is
sure!'

'I am answered.  Is it permitted to ask a question?'

The lama inclined his stately head.

'I ate thy bread for three years--as thou knowest.  Holy One, whence
came--?'

'There is much wealth, as men count it, in Bhotiyal,' the lama returned
with composure.  'In my own place I have the illusion of honour.  I ask
for that I need.  I am not concerned with the account. That is for my
monastery.  Ai!  The black high seats in the monastery, and novices all
in order!'

And he told stories, tracing with a finger in the dust, of the immense
and sumptuous ritual of avalanche-guarded cathedrals; of processions
and devil-dances; of the changing of monks and nuns into swine; of holy
cities fifteen thousand feet in the air; of intrigue between monastery
and monastery; of voices among the hills, and of that mysterious mirage
that dances on dry snow.  He spoke even of Lhassa and of the Dalai
Lama, whom he had seen and adored.

Each long, perfect day rose behind Kim for a barrier to cut him off
from his race and his mother-tongue.  He slipped back to thinking and
dreaming in the vernacular, and mechanically followed the lama's
ceremonial observances at eating, drinking, and the like.  The old
man's mind turned more and more to his monastery as his eyes turned to
the steadfast snows.  His River troubled him nothing.  Now and again,
indeed, he would gaze long and long at a tuft or a twig, expecting, he
said, the earth to cleave and deliver its blessing; but he was content
to be with his disciple, at ease in the temperate wind that comes down
from the Doon.  This was not Ceylon, nor Buddh Gaya, nor Bombay, nor
some grass-tangled ruins that he seemed to have stumbled upon two years
ago.  He spoke of those places as a scholar removed from vanity, as a
Seeker walking in humility, as an old man, wise and temperate,
illumining knowledge with brilliant insight.  Bit by bit,
disconnectedly, each tale called up by some wayside thing, he spoke of
all his wanderings up and down Hind; till Kim, who had loved him
without reason, now loved him for fifty good reasons.  So they enjoyed
themselves in high felicity, abstaining, as the Rule demands, from evil
words, covetous desires; not over-eating, not lying on high beds, nor
wearing rich clothes.  Their stomachs told them the time, and the
people brought them their food, as the saying is.  They were lords of
the villages of Aminabad, Sahaigunge, Akrola of the Ford, and little
Phulesa, where Kim gave the soulless woman a blessing.

But news travels fast in India, and too soon shuffled across the
crop-land, bearing a basket of fruits with a box of Kabul grapes and
gilt oranges, a white-whiskered servitor--a lean, dry Oorya--begging
them to bring the honour of their presence to his mistress, distressed
in her mind that the lama had neglected her so long.

'Now do I remember'--the lama spoke as though it were a wholly new
proposition.  'She is virtuous, but an inordinate talker.'

Kim was sitting on the edge of a cow's manger, telling stories to a
village smith's children.

'She will only ask for another son for her daughter.  I have not
forgotten her,' he said.  'Let her acquire merit.  Send word that we
will come.'

They covered eleven miles through the fields in two days, and were
overwhelmed with attentions at the end; for the old lady held a fine
tradition of hospitality, to which she forced her son-in-law, who was
under the thumb of his women-folk and bought peace by borrowing of the
money-lender.  Age had not weakened her tongue or her memory, and from
a discreetly barred upper window, in the hearing of not less than a
dozen servants, she paid Kim compliments that would have flung European
audiences into unclean dismay.

'But thou art still the shameless beggar-brat of the parao,' she
shrilled.  'I have not forgotten thee.  Wash ye and eat.  The father of
my daughter's son is gone away awhile.  So we poor women are dumb and
useless.'

For proof, she harangued the entire household unsparingly till food and
drink were brought; and in the evening--the smoke-scented evening,
copper-dun and turquoise across the fields--it pleased her to order her
palanquin to be set down in the untidy forecourt by smoky torchlight;
and there, behind not too closely drawn curtains, she gossiped.

'Had the Holy One come alone, I should have received him otherwise; but
with this rogue, who can be too careful?'

'Maharanee,' said Kim, choosing as always the amplest title, 'is it my
fault that none other than a Sahib--a polis-Sahib--called the Maharanee
whose face he--' 'Chutt!  That was on the pilgrimage. When we
travel--thou knowest the proverb.'

'Called the Maharanee a Breaker of Hearts and a Dispenser of Delights?'

'To remember that!  It was true.  So he did.  That was in the time of
the bloom of my beauty.'  She chuckled like a contented parrot above
the sugar lump.  'Now tell me of thy goings and comings--as much as may
be without shame.  How many maids, and whose wives, hang upon thine
eyelashes?  Ye hail from Benares?  I would have gone there again this
year, but my daughter--we have only two sons.  Phaii!  Such is the
effect of these low plains.  Now in Kulu men are elephants.  But I
would ask thy Holy One--stand aside, rogue--a charm against most
lamentable windy colics that in mango-time overtake my daughter's
eldest.  Two years back he gave me a powerful spell.'

'Oh, Holy One!'  said Kim, bubbling with mirth at the lama's rueful
face.

'It is true.  I gave her one against wind.'

'Teeth--teeth--teeth,' snapped the old woman.

"'Cure them if they are sick,"' Kim quoted relishingly, "'but by no
means work charms.  Remember what befell the Mahratta."'

'That was two Rains ago; she wearied me with her continual
importunity.'  The lama groaned as the Unjust Judge had groaned before
him.  'Thus it comes--take note, my chela--that even those who would
follow the Way are thrust aside by idle women.  Three days through,
when the child was sick, she talked to me.'

'Arre!  and to whom else should I talk?  The boy's mother knew nothing,
and the father--in the nights of the cold weather it was--"Pray to the
Gods," said he, forsooth, and turning over, snored!'

'I gave her the charm.  What is an old man to do?'

"'To abstain from action is well--except to acquire merit."'

'Ah chela, if thou desertest me, I am all alone.'

'He found his milk-teeth easily at any rate,' said the old lady. 'But
all priests are alike.'

Kim coughed severely.  Being young, he did not approve of her
flippancy.  'To importune the wise out of season is to invite calamity.'

'There is a talking mynah'--the thrust came back with the
well-remembered snap of the jewelled fore-finger--'over the stables
which has picked up the very tone of the family priest.  Maybe I forget
honour to my guests, but if ye had seen him double his fists into his
belly, which was like a half-grown gourd, and cry:  "Here is the pain!"
ye would forgive.  I am half minded to take the hakim's medicine.  He
sells it cheap, and certainly it makes him fat as Shiv's own bull.  He
does not deny remedies, but I doubted for the child because of the
in-auspicious colour of the bottles.'

The lama, under cover of the monologue, had faded out into the darkness
towards the room prepared.

'Thou hast angered him, belike,' said Kim.

'Not he.  He is wearied, and I forgot, being a grandmother.  (None but
a grandmother should ever oversee a child.  Mothers are only fit for
bearing.) Tomorrow, when he sees how my daughter's son is grown, he
will write the charm.  Then, too, he can judge of the new hakim's
drugs.'

'Who is the hakim, Maharanee?'

'A wanderer, as thou art, but a most sober Bengali from Dacca--a master
of medicine.  He relieved me of an oppression after meat by means of a
small pill that wrought like a devil unchained.  He travels about now,
vending preparations of great value.  He has even papers, printed in
Angrezi, telling what things he has done for weak-backed men and slack
women.  He has been here four days; but hearing ye were coming (hakims
and priests are snake and tiger the world over) he has, as I take it,
gone to cover.'

While she drew breath after this volley, the ancient servant, sitting
unrebuked on the edge of the torchlight, muttered:  'This house is a
cattle-pound, as it were, for all charlatans and--priests. Let the boy
stop eating mangoes ...  but who can argue with a grandmother?'  He
raised his voice respectfully:  'Sahiba, the hakim sleeps after his
meat.  He is in the quarters behind the dovecote.'

Kim bristled like an expectant terrier.  To outface and down-talk a
Calcutta-taught Bengali, a voluble Dacca drug-vendor, would be a good
game.  It was not seemly that the lama, and incidentally himself,
should be thrown aside for such an one.  He knew those curious bastard
English advertisements at the backs of native newspapers.  St Xavier's
boys sometimes brought them in by stealth to snigger over among their
mates; for the language of the grateful patient recounting his symptoms
is most simple and revealing.  The Oorya, not unanxious to play off one
parasite against the other, slunk away towards the dovecote.

'Yes,' said Kim, with measured scorn.  'Their stock-in-trade is a
little coloured water and a very great shamelessness.  Their prey are
broken-down kings and overfed Bengalis.  Their profit is in
children--who are not born.'  The old lady chuckled.  'Do not be
envious. Charms are better, eh?  I never gainsaid it.  See that thy
Holy One writes me a good amulet by the morning.'

'None but the ignorant deny'--a thick, heavy voice boomed through the
darkness, as a figure came to rest squatting--'None but the ignorant
deny the value of charms.  None but the ignorant deny the value of
medicines.'

'A rat found a piece of turmeric.  Said he:  "I will open a grocer's
shop,"' Kim retorted.

Battle was fairly joined now, and they heard the old lady stiffen to
attention.

'The priest's son knows the names of his nurse and three Gods.  Says
he:  "Hear me, or I will curse you by the three million Great Ones."'
Decidedly this invisible had an arrow or two in his quiver.  He went
on:  'I am but a teacher of the alphabet.  I have learned all the
wisdom of the Sahibs.'

'The Sahibs never grow old.  They dance and they play like children
when they are grandfathers.  A strong-backed breed,' piped the voice
inside the palanquin.

'I have, too, our drugs which loosen humours of the head in hot and
angry men.  Sina well compounded when the moon stands in the proper
House; yellow earths I have--arplan from China that makes a man renew
his youth and astonish his household; saffron from Kashmir, and the
best salep of Kabul.  Many people have died before--'

'That I surely believe,' said Kim.

'They knew the value of my drugs.  I do not give my sick the mere ink
in which a charm is written, but hot and rending drugs which descend
and wrestle with the evil.'

'Very mightily they do so,' sighed the old lady.

The voice launched into an immense tale of misfortune and bankruptcy,
studded with plentiful petitions to the Government.  'But for my fate,
which overrules all, I had been now in Government employ.  I bear a
degree from the great school at Calcutta--whither, maybe, the son of
this House shall go.'

'He shall indeed.  If our neighbour's brat can in a few years be made
an F A' (First Arts--she used the English word, of which she had heard
so often), 'how much more shall children clever as some that I know
bear away prizes at rich Calcutta.'

'Never,' said the voice, 'have I seen such a child!  Born in an
auspicious hour, and--but for that colic which, alas!  turning into
black cholers, may carry him off like a pigeon--destined to many years,
he is enviable.'

'Hai mai!'  said the old lady.  'To praise children is inauspicious, or
I could listen to this talk.  But the back of the house is unguarded,
and even in this soft air men think themselves to be men, and women we
know ...  The child's father is away too, and I must be chowkedar
[watchman] in my old age.  Up!  Up!  Take up the palanquin. Let the
hakim and the young priest settle between them whether charms or
medicine most avail.  Ho!  worthless people, fetch tobacco for the
guests, and--round the homestead go I!'

The palanquin reeled off, followed by straggling torches and a horde of
dogs.  Twenty villages knew the Sahiba--her failings, her tongue, and
her large charity.  Twenty villages cheated her after immemorial
custom, but no man would have stolen or robbed within her jurisdiction
for any gift under heaven.  None the less, she made great parade of her
formal inspections, the riot of which could be heard half-way to
Mussoorie.

Kim relaxed, as one augur must when he meets another.  The hakim, still
squatting, slid over his hookah with a friendly foot, and Kim pulled at
the good weed.  The hangers-on expected grave professional debate, and
perhaps a little free doctoring.

'To discuss medicine before the ignorant is of one piece with teaching
the peacock to sing,' said the hakim.

'True courtesy,' Kim echoed, 'is very often inattention.'

These, be it understood, were company-manners, designed to impress.

'Hi!  I have an ulcer on my leg,' cried a scullion.  'Look at it!'

'Get hence!  Remove!'  said the hakim.  'Is it the habit of the place
to pester honoured guests?  Ye crowd in like buffaloes.'

'If the Sahiba knew--' Kim began.

'Ai!  Ai!  Come away.  They are meat for our mistress.  When her young
Shaitan's colics are cured perhaps we poor people may be suffered to--'

'The mistress fed thy wife when thou wast in jail for breaking the
money-lender's head.  Who speaks against her?'  The old servitor curled
his white moustaches savagely in the young moonlight.  'I am
responsible for the honour of this house.  Go!'  and he drove the
underlings before him.

Said the hakim, hardly more than shaping the words with his lips: 'How
do you do, Mister O'Hara?  I am jolly glad to see you again.'

Kim's hand clenched about the pipe-stem.  Anywhere on the open road,
perhaps, he would not have been astonished; but here, in this quiet
backwater of life, he was not prepared for Hurree Babu.  It annoyed
him, too, that he had been hoodwinked.

'Ah ha!  I told you at Lucknow--resurgam--I shall rise again and you
shall not know me.  How much did you bet--eh?'

He chewed leisurely upon a few cardamom seeds, but he breathed uneasily.

'But why come here, Babuji?'

'Ah!  Thatt is the question, as Shakespeare hath it.  I come to
congratulate you on your extraordinary effeecient performance at Delhi.
Oah!  I tell you we are all proud of you.  It was verree neat and
handy.  Our mutual friend, he is old friend of mine.  He has been in
some dam'-tight places.  Now he will be in some more.  He told me; I
tell Mr Lurgan; and he is pleased you graduate so nicely. All the
Department is pleased.'

For the first time in his life, Kim thrilled to the clean pride (it can
be a deadly pitfall, none the less) of Departmental praise--ensnaring
praise from an equal of work appreciated by fellow-workers.  Earth has
nothing on the same plane to compare with it. But, cried the Oriental
in him, Babus do not travel far to retail compliments.

'Tell thy tale, Babu,' he said authoritatively.

'Oah, it is nothing.  Onlee I was at Simla when the wire came in about
what our mutual friend said he had hidden, and old Creighton--' He
looked to see how Kim would take this piece of audacity.

'The Colonel Sahib,' the boy from St Xavier's corrected.  'Of course.
He found me at a loose string, and I had to go down to Chitor to find
that beastly letter.  I do not like the South--too much railway travel;
but I drew good travelling allowance.  Ha!  Ha!  I meet our mutual at
Delhi on the way back.  He lies quiett just now, and says
Saddhu-disguise suits him to the ground.  Well, there I hear what you
have done so well, so quickly, upon the instantaneous spur of the
moment.  I tell our mutual you take the bally bun, by Jove!  It was
splendid.  I come to tell you so.'

'Umm!'

The frogs were busy in the ditches, and the moon slid to her setting.
Some happy servant had gone out to commune with the night and to beat
upon a drum.  Kim's next sentence was in the vernacular.

'How didst thou follow us?'

'Oah.  Thatt was nothing.  I know from our mutual friend you go to
Saharunpore.  So I come on.  Red Lamas are not inconspicuous persons. I
buy myself my drug-box, and I am very good doctor really.  I go to
Akrola of the Ford, and hear all about you, and I talk here and talk
there.  All the common people know what you do.  I knew when the
hospitable old lady sent the dooli.  They have great recollections of
the old lama's visits here.  I know old ladies cannot keep their hands
from medicines.  So I am a doctor, and--you hear my talk?  I think it
is verree good.  My word, Mister O'Hara, they know about you and the
lama for fifty miles--the common people.  So I come.  Do you mind?'

'Babuji,' said Kim, looking up at the broad, grinning face, 'I am a
Sahib.'

'My dear Mister O'Hara--'

'And I hope to play the Great Game.'

'You are subordinate to me departmentally at present.'

'Then why talk like an ape in a tree?  Men do not come after one from
Simla and change their dress, for the sake of a few sweet words.  I am
not a child.  Talk Hindi and let us get to the yolk of the egg. Thou
art here--speaking not one word of truth in ten.  Why art thou here?
Give a straight answer.'

'That is so verree disconcerting of the Europeans, Mister O'Hara. You
should know a heap better at your time of life.'

'But I want to know,' said Kim, laughing.  'If it is the Game, I may
help.  How can I do anything if you bukh [babble] all round the shop?'

Hurree Babu reached for the pipe, and sucked it till it gurgled again.

'Now I will speak vernacular.  You sit tight, Mister O'Hara ...  It
concerns the pedigree of a white stallion.'

'Still?  That was finished long ago.'

'When everyone is dead the Great Game is finished.  Not before. Listen
to me till the end.  There were Five Kings who prepared a sudden war
three years ago, when thou wast given the stallion's pedigree by Mahbub
Ali.  Upon them, because of that news, and ere they were ready, fell
our Army.'

'Ay--eight thousand men with guns.  I remember that night.'

'But the war was not pushed.  That is the Government custom.  The
troops were recalled because the Government believed the Five Kings
were cowed; and it is not cheap to feed men among the high Passes.
Hilas and Bunar--Rajahs with guns--undertook for a price to guard the
Passes against all coming from the North.  They protested both fear and
friendship.'  He broke off with a giggle into English:  'Of course, I
tell you this unoffeecially to elucidate political situation, Mister
O'Hara.  Offeecially, I am debarred from criticizing any action of
superiors.  Now I go on.--This pleased the Government, anxious to avoid
expense, and a bond was made for so many rupees a month that Hilas and
Bunar should guard the Passes as soon as the State's troops were
withdrawn.  At that time--it was after we two met--I, who had been
selling tea in Leh, became a clerk of accounts in the Army.  When the
troops were withdrawn, I was left behind to pay the coolies who made
new roads in the Hills. This road-making was part of the bond between
Bunar, Hilas, and the Government.'

'So?  And then?'

'I tell you, it was jolly-beastly cold up there too, after summer,'
said Hurree Babu confidentially.  'I was afraid these Bunar men would
cut my throat every night for thee pay-chest.  My native sepoy-guard,
they laughed at me!  By Jove!  I was such a fearful man.  Nevar mind
thatt.  I go on colloquially ...  I send word many times that these two
Kings were sold to the North; and Mahbub Ali, who was yet farther
North, amply confirmed it.  Nothing was done.  Only my feet were
frozen, and a toe dropped off.  I sent word that the roads for which I
was paying money to the diggers were being made for the feet of
strangers and enemies.'

'For?'

'For the Russians.  The thing was an open jest among the coolies. Then
I was called down to tell what I knew by speech of tongue. Mahbub came
South too.  See the end!  Over the Passes this year after
snow-melting'--he shivered afresh--'come two strangers under cover of
shooting wild goats.  They bear guns, but they bear also chains and
levels and compasses.'

'Oho!  The thing gets clearer.'

'They are well received by Hilas and Bunar.  They make great promises;
they speak as the mouthpiece of a Kaisar with gifts.  Up the valleys,
down the valleys go they, saying, "Here is a place to build a
breastwork; here can ye pitch a fort.  Here can ye hold the road
against an army"--the very roads for which I paid out the rupees
monthly.  The Government knows, but does nothing.  The three other
Kings, who were not paid for guarding the Passes, tell them by runner
of the bad faith of Bunar and Hilas.  When all the evil is done, look
you--when these two strangers with the levels and the compasses make
the Five Kings to believe that a great army will sweep the Passes
tomorrow or the next day--Hill-people are all fools--comes the order to
me, Hurree Babu, "Go North and see what those strangers do."  I say to
Creighton Sahib, "This is not a lawsuit, that we go about to collect
evidence."'  Hurree returned to his English with a jerk:  "'By Jove," I
said, "why the dooce do you not issue demi-offeecial orders to some
brave man to poison them, for an example?  It is, if you permit the
observation, most reprehensible laxity on your part."  And Colonel
Creighton, he laughed at me!  It is all your beastly English pride.
You think no one dare conspire!  That is all tommy-rott.'

Kim smoked slowly, revolving the business, so far as he understood it,
in his quick mind.

'Then thou goest forth to follow the strangers?'

'No.  To meet them.  They are coming in to Simla to send down their
horns and heads to be dressed at Calcutta.  They are exclusively
sporting gentlemen, and they are allowed special faceelities by the
Government.  Of course, we always do that.  It is our British pride.'

'Then what is to fear from them?'

'By Jove, they are not black people.  I can do all sorts of things with
black people, of course.  They are Russians, and highly unscrupulous
people.  I--I do not want to consort with them without a witness.'

'Will they kill thee?'

'Oah, thatt is nothing.  I am good enough Herbert Spencerian, I trust,
to meet little thing like death, which is all in my fate, you know.
But--but they may beat me.'

'Why?'

Hurree Babu snapped his fingers with irritation.  'Of course I shall
affeeliate myself to their camp in supernumerary capacity as perhaps
interpreter, or person mentally impotent and hungree, or some such
thing.  And then I must pick up what I can, I suppose.  That is as easy
for me as playing Mister Doctor to the old lady.  Onlee--onlee--you
see, Mister O'Hara, I am unfortunately Asiatic, which is serious
detriment in some respects.  And all-so I am Bengali--a fearful man.'

'God made the Hare and the Bengali.  What shame?'  said Kim, quoting
the proverb.

'It was process of Evolution, I think, from Primal Necessity, but the
fact remains in all the cui bono.  I am, oh, awfully fearful!--I
remember once they wanted to cut off my head on the road to Lhassa.
(No, I have never reached to Lhassa.) I sat down and cried, Mister
O'Hara, anticipating Chinese tortures.  I do not suppose these two
gentlemen will torture me, but I like to provide for possible
contingency with European assistance in emergency.'  He coughed and
spat out the cardamoms.  'It is purely unoffeecial indent, to which you
can say "No, Babu".  If you have no pressing engagement with your old
man--perhaps you might divert him; perhaps I can seduce his fancies--I
should like you to keep in Departmental touch with me till I find those
sporting coves.  I have great opeenion of you since I met my friend at
Delhi.  And also I will embody your name in my offeecial report when
matter is finally adjudicated.  It will be a great feather in your cap.
That is why I come really.'

'Humph!  The end of the tale, I think, is true; but what of the
fore-part?'

'About the Five Kings?  Oah!  there is ever so much truth in it.  A
lots more than you would suppose,' said Hurree earnestly.  'You
come--eh?  I go from here straight into the Doon.  It is verree verdant
and painted meads.  I shall go to Mussoorie to good old Munsoorie
Pahar, as the gentlemen and ladies say.  Then by Rampur into Chini.
That is the only way they can come.  I do not like waiting in the cold,
but we must wait for them.  I want to walk with them to Simla. You see,
one Russian is a Frenchman, and I know my French pretty well.  I have
friends in Chandernagore.'

'He would certainly rejoice to see the Hills again,' said Kim
meditatively.  'All his speech these ten days past has been of little
else.  If we go together--'

'Oah!  We can be quite strangers on the road, if your lama prefers.  I
shall just be four or five miles ahead.  There is no hurry for
Hurree--that is an Europe pun, ha!  ha!--and you come after.  There is
plenty of time; they will plot and survey and map, of course.  I shall
go tomorrow, and you the next day, if you choose.  Eh?  You go think on
it till morning.  By Jove, it is near morning now.'  He yawned
ponderously, and with never a civil word lumbered off to his
sleeping-place.  But Kim slept little, and his thoughts ran in
Hindustani:

'Well is the Game called great!  I was four days a scullion at Quetta,
waiting on the wife of the man whose book I stole.  And that was part
of the Great Game!  From the South--God knows how far--came up the
Mahratta, playing the Great Game in fear of his life. Now I shall go
far and far into the North playing the Great Game. Truly, it runs like
a shuttle throughout all Hind.  And my share and my joy'--he smiled to
the darkness--'I owe to the lama here.  Also to Mahbub Ali--also to
Creighton Sahib, but chiefly to the Holy One. He is right--a great and
a wonderful world--and I am Kim--Kim--Kim--alone--one person--in the
middle of it all.  But I will see these strangers with their levels and
chains...'

'What was the upshot of last night's babble?'  said the lama, after his
orisons.

'There came a strolling seller of drugs--a hanger-on of the Sahiba's.
Him I abolished by arguments and prayers, proving that our charms are
worthier than his coloured waters.'

'Alas, my charms!  Is the virtuous woman still bent upon a new one?'

'Very strictly.'

'Then it must be written, or she will deafen me with her clamour.' He
fumbled at his pencase.

'In the Plains,' said Kim, 'are always too many people.  In the Hills,
as I understand, there are fewer.'

'Oh!  the Hills, and the snows upon the Hills.'  The lami tore off a
tiny square of paper fit to go in an amulet.  'But what dost thou know
of the Hills?'

'They are very close.'  Kim thrust open the door and looked at the
long, peaceful line of the Himalayas flushed in morning-gold. 'Except
in the dress of a Sahib, I have never set foot among them.'

The lama snuffed the wind wistfully.

'If we go North,'--Kim put the question to the waking sunrise--'would
not much mid-day heat be avoided by walking among the lower hills at
least?  ...  Is the charm made, Holy One?'

'I have written the names of seven silly devils--not one of whom is
worth a grain of dust in the eye.  Thus do foolish women drag us from
the Way!'

Hurree Babu came out from behind the dovecote washing his teeth with
ostentatious ritual.  Full-fleshed, heavy-haunched, bull-necked, and
deep-voiced, he did not look like 'a fearful man'.  Kim signed almost
imperceptibly that matters were in good train, and when the morning
toilet was over, Hurree Babu, in flowery speech, came to do honour to
the lama.  They ate, of course, apart, and afterwards the old lady,
more or less veiled behind a window, returned to the vital business of
green-mango colics in the young.  The lama's knowledge of medicine was,
of course, sympathetic only.  He believed that the dung of a black
horse, mixed with sulphur, and carried in a snake-skin, was a sound
remedy for cholera; but the symbolism interested him far more than the
science.  Hurree Babu deferred to these views with enchanting
politeness, so that the lama called him a courteous physician.  Hurree
Babu replied that he was no more than an inexpert dabbler in the
mysteries; but at least--he thanked the Gods therefore--he knew when he
sat in the presence of a master.  He himself had been taught by the
Sahibs, who do not consider expense, in the lordly halls of Calcutta;
but, as he was ever first to acknowledge, there lay a wisdom behind
earthly wisdom--the high and lonely lore of meditation.  Kim looked on
with envy.  The Hurree Babu of his knowledge--oily, effusive, and
nervous--was gone; gone, too, was the brazen drug-vendor of overnight.
There remained--polished, polite, attentive--a sober, learned son of
experience and adversity, gathering wisdom from the lama's lips.  The
old lady confided to Kim that these rare levels were beyond her.  She
liked charms with plenty of ink that one could wash off in water,
swallow, and be done with.  Else what was the use of the Gods?  She
liked men and women, and she spoke of them--of kinglets she had known
in the past; of her own youth and beauty; of the depredations of
leopards and the eccentricities of love Asiatic; of the incidence of
taxation, rack-renting, funeral ceremonies, her son-in-law (this by
allusion, easy to be followed), the care of the young, and the age's
lack of decency.  And Kim, as interested in the life of this world as
she soon to leave it, squatted with his feet under the hem of his robe,
drinking all in, while the lama demolished one after another every
theory of body-curing put forward by Hurree Babu.

At noon the Babu strapped up his brass-bound drug-box, took his
patent-leather shoes of ceremony in one hand, a gay blue-and-white
umbrella in the other, and set off northwards to the Doon, where, he
said, he was in demand among the lesser kings of those parts.

'We will go in the cool of the evening, chela,' said the lama.  'That
doctor, learned in physic and courtesy, affirms that the people among
these lower hills are devout, generous, and much in need of a teacher.
In a very short time--so says the hakim--we come to cool air and the
smell of pines.'

'Ye go to the Hills?  And by Kulu road?  Oh, thrice happy!'  shrilled
the old lady.  'But that I am a little pressed with the care of the
homestead I would take palanquin ...  but that would be shameless, and
my reputation would be cracked.  Ho!  Ho!  I know the road--every march
of the road I know.  Ye will find charity throughout--it is not denied
to the well-looking.  I will give orders for provision.  A servant to
set you forth upon your journey?  No ...  Then I will at least cook ye
good food.'

'What a woman is the Sahiba!'  said the white-bearded Oorya, when a
tumult rose by the kitchen quarters.  'She has never forgotten a
friend:  she has never forgotten an enemy in all her years.  And her
cookery--wah!'  He rubbed his slim stomach.

There were cakes, there were sweetmeats, there was cold fowl stewed to
rags with rice and prunes--enough to burden Kim like a mule.

'I am old and useless,' she said.  'None now love me--and none
respect--but there are few to compare with me when I call on the Gods
and squat to my cooking-pots.  Come again, O people of good will.  Holy
One and disciple, come again.  The room is always prepared; the welcome
is always ready ...  See the women do not follow thy chela too openly.
I know the women of Kulu.  Take heed, chela, lest he run away when he
smells his Hills again ...  Hai!  Do not tilt the rice-bag upside down
...  Bless the household, Holy One, and forgive thy servant her
stupidities.'

She wiped her red old eyes on a corner of her veil, and clucked
throatily.

'Women talk,' said the lama at last, 'but that is a woman's infirmity.
I gave her a charm.  She is upon the Wheel and wholly given over to the
shows of this life, but none the less, chela, she is virtuous, kindly,
hospitable--of a whole and zealous heart.  Who shall say she does not
acquire merit?'

'Not I, Holy One,' said Kim, reslinging the bountiful provision on his
shoulders.  'In my mind--behind my eyes--I have tried to picture such
an one altogether freed from the Wheel--desiring nothing, causing
nothing--a nun, as it were.'

'And, O imp?'  The lama almost laughed aloud.

'I cannot make the picture.'

'Nor I. But there are many, many millions of lives before her.  She
will get wisdom a little, it may be, in each one.'

'And will she forget how to make stews with saffron upon that road?'

'Thy mind is set on things unworthy.  But she has skill.  I am
refreshed all over.  When we reach the lower hills I shall be yet
stronger.  The hakim spoke truly to me this morn when he said a breath
from the snows blows away twenty years from the life of a man.  We will
go up into the Hills--the high hills--up to the sound of snow-waters
and the sound of the trees--for a little while.  The hakim said that at
any time we may return to the Plains, for we do no more than skirt the
pleasant places.  The hakim is full of learning; but he is in no way
proud.  I spoke to him--when thou wast talking to the Sahiba--of a
certain dizziness that lays hold upon the back of my neck in the night,
and he said it rose from excessive heat--to be cured by cool air.  Upon
consideration, I marvelled that I had not thought of such a simple
remedy.'

'Didst thou tell him of thy Search?'  said Kim, a little jealously. He
preferred to sway the lama by his own speech--not through the wiles of
Hurree Babu.

'Assuredly.  I told him of my dream, and of the manner by which I had
acquired merit by causing thee to be taught wisdom.'

'Thou didst not say I was a Sahib?'

'What need?  I have told thee many times we be but two souls seeking
escape.  He said--and he is just herein--that the River of Healing will
break forth even as I dreamed--at my feet, if need be.  Having found
the Way, seest thou, that shall free me from the Wheel, need I trouble
to find a way about the mere fields of earth--which are illusion?  That
were senseless.  I have my dreams, night upon night repeated; I have
Jataka; and I have thee, Friend of all the World. It was written in thy
horoscope that a Red Bull on a green field--I have not
forgotten--should bring thee to honour.  Who but I saw that prophecy
accomplished?  Indeed, I was the instrument.  Thou shalt find me my
River, being in return the instrument.  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.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: E23's disguise helps him to avoid the people who are looking for him, but he still needs to find a way to get out the information about where he buried the letter that caused all of this to-do. A white man appears--a District Superintendent of Police. E23 bumps into him and then shouts filthy abuse at him. The District Superintendent thinks that he's drunk, and looks like he might arrest him, but then E23 hands him his train ticket and sucks up to him as best he can. Kim slips after E23 because he recognizes the District Superintendent: it's the same guy who bantered with the Kulu woman in Chapter 4. E23 whispers to Kim that everything's okay--the District Superintendent of Police has gotten his message, so the letter will be safe. It turns out that this guy is also part of the Secret Service. E23 thanks Kim for saving his life and then sends him off about his business. Back with the lama, the lama scolds Kim for his "prideful workings" in transforming the Mahratta just to cause mischief. Kim is hurt by the lama's judgment, but they move on, traveling towards the Kulu woman's house. The lama believes that Kim should cure the sick if he can, because that is a good deed, but otherwise he should avoid acting, because to do so keeps you tied to this life. Kim tells the lama that he has been taught to act--how can you not? The lama warns Kim that he shouldn't be deceived by differences between people: we are all moving through life together, looking for understanding. The lama and Kim finally arrive at the Kulu woman's house. She welcomes them warmly and teases Kim about being a young ladykiller, but then she immediately starts nagging the lama about charms to protect the health of her grandsons. As she is talking on, the lama goes off to his room to sleep. Kim sticks around and hears the Kulu woman talking about a traveling hakim who is staying on her property; her servant goes to bring this hakim inside to meet Kim. As the hakim arrives, he and Kim quickly fall into an exchange of insults about the quality of his products. It's only once the Kulu woman and the servants leave the room that the hakim reveals himself: it's the Babu. It turns out that the Babu was the one sent to pick up the letter E23 hid while his enemies were chasing him. Everyone is happy with Kim at the Secret Service: E23, Lurgan--everybody. Kim basically tells the Babu to cut the crap--Why would the Babu come all of this way from Simla just to pat Kim on the back and tell him that he's doing a good job? The Babu admits that it all has to do with "the pedigree of a white stallion" . Kim thought all of that stuff with the secret message from Mahbub Ali to Creighton was over long ago--like, around Chapter 5. The Babu explains: The Five Kings at the northern border of India and Afghanistan were threatening a war. The government sent a bunch of troops, but then they ordered those troops to stand down. They assumed that the Five Kings were probably intimidated by this show of military strength. So they made a deal with two of these five kings, Hilas and Bunar, to hold the northern mountain passes against anyone coming down to India from the north. In exchange for this support from Hilas and Bunar, the government invested in roads and infrastructure for their regions. It's been the Babu's job to oversee all of this construction. But now, the Babu has heard news of two people coming down from the North in disguise as goat-hunters. These "hunters" also carry compasses and other devices for map-making. These men represent the Russians, and it seems like they are convincing Hilas and Bunar to join their side. The government won't act against these men, so the Babu has been planning to join them as an interpreter or something, but now he's actually feeling kind of... frightened. He doesn't want to get too close. So the Babu wants Kim to come along with him and help. Kim and the Babu both get together to convince the lama to travel north into the hills. Kim tells the lama there will be fewer people there to distract him from his search for the River of the Arrow, and the Babu tells him happy stories about Northerners who love religion and who need a teacher. The lama decides to head north.