'For whoso will, from Pride released,
Contemning neither creed nor priest,
May hear the Soul of all the East
About him at Kamakura.'
THEY entered the fort-like railway station, black in the end of night;
the electrics sizzling over the goods yard where they handle the heavy
Northern grain-traffic.
'This is the work of devils!' said the lama, recoiling from the hollow
echoing darkness, the glimmer of rails between the masonry platforms,
and the maze of girders above. He stood in a gigantic stone hall paved,
it seemed, with the sheeted dead--third-class passengers who had taken
their tickets overnight and were sleeping in the waiting-rooms. All
hours of the twenty-four are alike to Orientals, and their passenger
traffic is regulated accordingly.
'This is where the fire-carriages come. One stands behind that
hole'--Kim pointed to the ticket-office--'who will give thee a paper to
take thee to Umballa.'
'But we go to Benares,' he replied petulantly.
'All one. Benares then. Quick: she comes!'
'Take thou the purse.'
The lama, not so well used to trains as he had pretended, started as the
3.25 a. m. south bound roared in. The sleepers sprang to life, and the
station filled with clamour and shoutings, cries of water and sweetmeat
vendors, shouts of native policemen, and shrill yells of women gathering
up their baskets, their families, and their husbands.
'It is the train--only the te-rain. It will come here. Wait!' Amazed at
the lama's immense simplicity (he had handed him a small bag full of
rupees), Kim asked and paid for a ticket to Umballa. A sleepy clerk
grunted and flung out a ticket to the next station, just six miles
distant.
'Nay,' said Kim, scanning it with a grin. 'This may serve for farmers,
but I live in the city of Lahore. It was cleverly done, babu. Now give
the ticket to Umballa.'
The babu scowled and dealt the proper ticket.
'Now another to Amritzar,' said Kim, who had no notion of spending
Mahbub Ali's money oh anything so crude as a paid ride to Umballa. 'The
price is so much. The small money in return is just so much. I know the
ways of the te-rain. . . . Never did yogi need chela as thou dost,' he
went on merrily to the bewildered lama. 'They would have flung thee out
at Mian Mir but for me. This way! Come.' He returned the money, keeping
only one anna in each rupee of the price of the Umballa ticket as his
commission--the immemorial commission of Asia.
The lama jibbed at the open door of a crowded third-class carriage.
'Were it not better to walk?' said he weakly.
A burly Sikh artisan thrust forth his bearded head. 'Is he afraid? Do
not be afraid. I remember the time when I was afraid of the te-rain.
Enter! This thing is the work of the Government.'
[Illustration: 'Beggars a plenty have I met, and holy men to boot, but
never such a _yogi_ nor such a disciple.']
'I do not fear,' said the lama. 'Have ye room within for two?'
'There is no room even for a mouse,' shrilled the wife of a well-to-do
cultivator--a Hindu Jat from the rich Jullundur district. Our night
trains are not as well looked after as the day ones, where the sexes are
very strictly kept to separate carriages.
'Oh, mother of my son, we can make space,' said the blue-turbaned
husband. 'Pick up the child. It is a holy man, see'st thou?'
'And my lap full of seventy times seven bundles! Why not bid him sit on
my knee, Shameless? But men are ever thus!' She looked round for
approval. An Amritzar courtesan near the window sniffed behind her head
drapery.
'Enter! Enter!' cried a fat Hindu money-lender, his folded account-book
in a cloth under his arm. With an oily smirk: 'It is well to be kind to
the poor.'
'Ay, at seven per cent a month with a mortgage on the unborn calf,' said
a young Dogra soldier going south on leave; and they all laughed.
'Will it travel to Benares?' said the lama.
'Assuredly. Else why should we come? Enter, or we are left,' cried Kim.
'See!' shrilled the Amritzar girl. 'He has never entered a train. Oh
see!'
'Nay, help,' said the cultivator, putting out a large brown hand and
hauling him in. 'Thus is it done, father.'
'But--but--I sit on the floor. It is against the Rule to sit on a
bench,' said the lama. 'Moreover, it cramps me.'
'I say,' began the money-lender, pursing his lips, 'that there is not
one rule of right living which these te-rains do not cause us to break.
We sit, for example, side by side with all castes and peoples.'
'Yea, and with most outrageously shameless ones,' said the wife,
scowling at the Amritzar girl making eyes at the young sepoy.
'I said we might have gone by cart along the road,' said the husband,
'and thus have saved some money.'
'Yes--and spent twice over what we saved on food by the way. That was
talked out ten thousand times.'
'Ay, by ten thousand tongues,' grunted he.
'The Gods help us poor women if we may not speak. Oho! He is of that
sort which may not look at or reply to a woman.' For the lama,
constrained by his Rule, took not the faintest notice of her. 'And his
disciple is like him?'
'Nay, mother,' said Kim most promptly. 'Not when the woman is
well-looking and above all charitable to the hungry.'
'A beggar's answer,' said the Sikh, laughing. 'Thou hast brought it on
thyself, sister!' Kim's hands were crooked in supplication.
'And whither goest thou?' said the woman, handing him the half of a cake
from a greasy package.
'Even to Benares.'
'Jugglers belike?' the young soldier suggested. 'Have ye any tricks to
pass the time? Why does not that yellow man answer?'
'Because,' said Kim stoutly, 'he is holy, and thinks upon matters hidden
from thee.'
'That may be well. We of the Loodhiana Sikhs,' he rolled it out
sonorously, 'do not trouble our heads with doctrine. We fight.'
'My sister's brother's son is naik (corporal) in that regiment,' said
the Sikh craftsman quietly. 'There are also some Dogra companies there.'
The soldier glared, for a Dogra is of other caste than a Sikh, and the
banker tittered.
'They are all one to me,' said the Amritzar girl.
'That we believe,' snorted the cultivator's wife malignantly.
'Nay, but all who serve the Sirkar with weapons in their hands are, as
it were, one brotherhood. There is one brotherhood of the caste, but
beyond that again'--she looked round timidly--'the bond of the
Pulton--the Regiment--eh?'
'My brother is in a Jat regiment,' said the cultivator. 'Dogras be good
men.'
'Thy Sikhs at least were of that opinion,' said the soldier, with a
scowl at the placid old man in the corner. 'Thy Sikhs thought so when
our two companies came to help them at the Pirzai Kotal in the face of
eight Afreedee standards on the ridge not three months gone.'
He told the story of a border action in which the Dogra companies of the
Loodhiana Sikhs had acquitted themselves well. The Amritzar girl smiled;
for she knew the tale was to win her approval.
'Alas!' said the cultivator's wife at the end. 'So their villages were
burnt and their little children made homeless?'
'They had marked our dead. They paid a great payment after we of the
Sikhs had schooled them. So it was. Is this Amritzar?'
'Ay, and here they cut our tickets,' said the banker, fumbling at his
belt.
The lamps were paling in the dawn when the half-caste guard came round.
Ticket-collecting is a slow business in the East, where people secrete
their tickets in all sorts of curious places. Kim produced his and was
told to get out.
'But I go to Umballa,' he protested. 'I go with this holy man.'
'Thou canst go to Jehannum for aught I care. This ticket is only to
Amritzar. Out!'
Kim burst into a flood of tears, protesting that the lama was his father
and his mother, that he was the prop of the lama's declining years, and
that the lama would die without his care. All the carriage bade the
guard be merciful,--the banker was specially eloquent here,--but the
guard hauled Kim on to the platform. The lama blinked, he could not
overtake the situation, and Kim lifted up his voice and wept outside the
carriage window.
'I am very poor. My father is dead--my mother is dead. Oh, charitable
ones, if I am left here, who shall tend that old man?'
'What--what is this?' the lama repeated. 'He must go to Benares. He must
come with me. He is my chela. If there is money to be paid--'
'Oh, be silent,' whispered Kim; 'are we Rajahs to throw away good silver
when the world is so charitable?'
The Amritzar girl stepped out with her bundles, and it was on her that
Kim kept his watchful eye. Ladies of that persuasion, he knew, were
generous.
'A ticket--a little tikkut to Umballa--O Breaker of Hearts!' She
laughed. 'Hast thou no charity?'
'Does the holy man come from the North?'
'From far and far in the North he comes,' cried Kim. 'From among the
hills.'
'There is snow among the pine trees in the North--in the hills there is
snow. My mother was from Kulu. Get thee a ticket. Ask him for a
blessing.'
'Ten thousand blessings,' shrilled Kim. 'O Holy One, a woman has given
us in charity so that I can come with thee--a woman with a golden heart.
I run for the tikkut.'
The girl looked up at the lama, who had mechanically followed Kim to the
platform. He bowed his head that he might not see her, and muttered in
Tibetan as she passed on with the crowd.
'Light come--light go,' said the cultivator's wife viciously.
'She has acquired merit,' returned the lama. 'Beyond doubt it was a
nun.'
'There be ten thousand such nuns in Amritzar alone. Return, old man, or
the train may depart without thee,' cried the banker.
'Not only was it sufficient for the ticket, but for a little food also,'
said Kim, leaping to his place. 'Now eat, Holy One. Look. Day comes!'
Golden, rose, saffron, and pink, the morning mists smoked away across
the flat green levels. All the rich Punjab lay out in the splendour of
the keen sun. The lama flinched a little as the telegraph-posts swung
by.
'Great is the speed of the train,' said the banker, with a patronising
grin. 'We have gone farther since Lahore than thou couldst walk in two
days: at even, we shall enter Umballa.'
'And that is still far from Benares,' said the lama wearily, mumbling
over the cakes that Kim offered. They all unloosed their bundles and
made their morning meal. Then the banker, the cultivator, and the
soldier prepared their pipes and wrapped the compartment in choking,
acrid smoke, spitting and coughing and enjoying themselves. The Sikh and
the cultivator's wife chewed pan; the lama took snuff and told his
beads, while Kim, cross-legged, smiled over the comfort of a full
stomach.
'What rivers have ye by Benares?' said the lama of a sudden to the
carriage at large.
'We have Gunga,' returned the banker, when the little titter had
subsided.
'What others?'
'What other than Gunga?'
'Nay, but in my mind was the thought of a certain River of healing.'
'That is Gunga. Who bathes in her is made clean and goes to the gods.
Thrice have I made pilgrimage to Gunga.' He looked round proudly.
'There was need,' said the young sepoy drily, and the travellers' laugh
turned against the banker.
'Clean--to return again to the Gods,' the lama muttered. 'And to go
forth on the round of lives anew--still tied to the Wheel.' He shook his
head testily. 'But maybe there is a mistake. Who, then, made Gunga in
the beginning?'
'The Gods. Of what known faith art thou?' the banker said, appalled.
'I follow the Law--the Most Excellent Law. So it was the Gods that made
Gunga. What like of Gods were they?'
The carriage looked at him in amazement. It was inconceivable that any
one should be ignorant of Gunga.
'What--what is thy God?' said the money-lender at last.
'Hear!' said the lama, shifting the rosary to his hand. 'Hear: for I
speak of Him now! O people of Hind, listen!'
He began in Urdu the tale of the Lord Buddha, but, borne by his own
thoughts, slid into Tibetan and long-droned texts from a Chinese book of
the Buddha's life. The gentle, tolerant folk looked on reverently. All
India is full of holy men stammering gospels in strange tongues; shaken
and consumed in the fires of their own zeal; dreamers, babblers, and
visionaries: as it has been from the beginning and will continue to the
end.
'Um!' said the soldier of the Loodhiana Sikhs. 'There was a Mohammedan
regiment lay next to us at the Pirzai Kotal, and a priest of theirs,--he
was, as I remember, a naik,--when the fit was on him, spake prophecies.
But the mad all are in God's keeping. His officers overlooked much in
that man.'
The lama fell back on Urdu, remembering that he was in a strange land.
'Hear the tale of the Arrow which our Lord loosed from the bow,' he
said.
This was much more to their taste, and they listened curiously while he
told it. 'Now, O people of Hind, I go to seek that River. Know ye aught
that may guide me, for we be all men and women in evil case.'
'There is Gunga--and Gunga alone--who washes away sin,' ran the murmur
round the carriage.
'Though past question we have good Gods Jullundur-way,' said the
cultivator's wife, looking out of window. 'See how they have blessed the
crops.'
'To search every river in the Punjab is no small matter,' said her
husband. 'For me, a stream that leaves good silt on my land suffices,
and I thank Bhumia, the God of the Homestead.' He shrugged one knotted,
bronzed shoulder.
Think you our Lord came so far north?' said the lama, turning to Kim.
'It may be,' Kim replied soothingly, as he spat red pan-juice on the
floor.
'The last of the Great Ones,' said the Sikh with authority, 'was
Sikander Julkarn (Alexander the Great). He paved the streets of
Jullundur and built a great tank near Umballa. That pavement holds to
this day; and the tank is there also. I never heard of thy God.'
'Let thy hair grow long and talk Punjabi,' said the young soldier
jestingly to Kim, quoting a Northern proverb. 'That is all that makes a
Sikh.' But he did not say this very loud.
The lama sighed and shrank into himself, a dingy, shapeless mass. In the
pauses of their talk they could hear, the low droning--'Om mane pudme
hum! Om mane pudme hum!'--and the thick click of the wooden rosary
beads.
'It irks me,' he said at last. 'The speed and the clatter irk me.
Moreover, my chela, I think that may be we have overpassed that River.'
'Peace, peace,' said Kim. 'Was not the River near Benares? We are yet
far from the place.'
'But--if our Lord came north, it may be any one of these little ones
that we have run across.'
'I do not know.'
'But thou wast sent to me--wast thou sent to me?--for the merit I had
acquired over yonder at Suchzen. From beside the cannon didst thou
come--bearing two faces--and two garbs.'
'Peace. One must not speak of these things here,' whispered Kim. 'There
was but one of me. Think again and thou wilt remember. A boy--a Hindu
boy--by the great green cannon.'
'But was there not also an Englishman with a white beard--holy--among
images--who himself made more sure my assurance of the River of the
Arrow?'
'He--we--went to the Ajaib-Gher in Lahore to pray before the gods
there,' Kim explained to the openly listening company. 'And the Sahib of
the Wonder House talked to him--yes, this is truth--as a brother. He is
a Very holy man, from far beyond the hills. Rest thou. In time we come
to Umballa.'
'But my River--the River of my healing?'
'And then, if it please thee, we will go hunting for that River on foot.
So that we miss nothing--not even a little rivulet in a field-side.'
'But thou hast a Search of thine own?' The lama--very pleased that he
remembered so well--sat bolt upright.
'Ay,' said Kim, humouring him. The boy was entirely happy to be out
chewing pan and seeing new people in the great good-tempered world.
'It was a Bull--a Red Bull that shall come and help thee--and carry
thee--whither? I have forgotten. A Red Bull on a green field, was it
not?'
'Nay, it will carry me nowhere,' said Kim. 'It is but a tale I told
thee.'
'What is this?' the cultivator's wife leaned forward, her bracelets
clinking on her arm. 'Do ye both dream dreams? A Red Bull on a green
field, that shall carry thee to the Heavens--or what? Was it a vision?
Did one make a prophecy? We have a Red Bull in our village behind
Jullundur city, and he grazes by choice in the very greenest of our
fields!'
'Give a woman an old wife's tale and a weaver-bird a leaf and a thread,
they will weave wonderful things,' said the Sikh. 'All holy men dream
dreams, and by following holy men their disciples attain that power.'
'A Red Bull on a green field, was it?' the lama repeated. 'In a former
life it may be thou hast acquired merit, and the Bull will come to
reward thee.'
'Nay--nay--it was but a tale one told to me--for a jest belike. But I
will seek the Bull about Umballa, and thou canst look for thy River and
rest from the clatter of the train.'
'It may be that the Bull knows--that he is sent to guide us both,' said
the lama, hopefully as a child. Then to the company, indicating Kim:
'This one was sent to me but yesterday. He is not, I think, of this
world.'
'Beggars a plenty have I met, and holy men to boot, but never such a
yogi nor such a disciple,' said the woman.
Her husband touched his forehead lightly with one finger and smiled. But
the next time the lama would eat they took care to give him their best.
And at last--tired, sleepy, and dusty--they reached Umballa City
Station.
'We abide here upon a law-suit,' said the cultivator's wife to Kim. 'We
lodge with my man's cousin's younger brother. There is room also in the
courtyard for thy yogi and for thee. Will--will he give me a blessing?'
'O holy man! A woman with a heart of gold gives us lodging for the
night. It is a kindly land, this land of the South. See how we have been
helped since the dawn!'
The lama bowed his head in benediction.
'To fill my cousin's younger brother's house with wastrels--' the
husband began, as he shouldered his heavy bamboo staff.
'Thy cousin's younger brother owes my father's cousin something yet on
his daughter's marriage-feast,' said the woman crisply. 'Let him put
their food to that account. The yogi will beg, I doubt not.'
'Ay, I beg for him,' said Kim, anxious only to get the lama under
shelter for the night, that he might seek Mahbub Ali's Englishman and
deliver himself of the white stallion's pedigree.
'Now,' said he, when the lama had come to an anchor in the inner
courtyard of a decent Hindu house behind the cantonments, 'I go away for
a while--to--to buy us victual in the bazar. Do not stray abroad till I
return.'
'Thou wilt return? Thou wilt surely return?' The old man caught at his
wrist. 'And thou wilt return in this very same shape? Is it too late to
look to-night for the River?'
'Too late and too dark. Be comforted. Think how far thou art on the
road--an hundred kos from Lahore already.'
'Yea--and farther from my monastery. Alas! It is a great and terrible
world.'
Kim stole out and away, as unremarkable a figure as ever carried his own
and a few score thousand other folk's fate slung round his neck. Mahbub
Ali's directions left him little doubt of the house in which his
Englishman lived; and a groom, bringing a dog-cart home from the Club,
made him quite sure. It remained only to identify his man, and Kim
slipped through the garden hedge and hid in a clump of plumed grass
close to the veranda. The house blazed with lights, and servants moved
about tables dressed with flowers, glass, and silver. Presently forth
came an Englishman, dressed in black and white, humming a tune. It was
too dark to see his face, so Kim, beggar-wise, tried an old experiment.
'Protector of the Poor!'
The man backed towards the voice.
'Mahbub Ali says--'
'Hah! What says Mahbub Ali?' He made no attempt to look for the speaker,
and that showed Kim that he knew.
'The pedigree of the white stallion is fully established.'
'What proof is there?' The Englishman switched at the rose-hedge in the
side of the drive.
'Mahbub Ali has given me this proof.' Kim flipped the wad of folded
paper into the air, and it fell on the path beside the man, who put his
foot on it as a gardener came round the corner. When the servant passed
he picked it up, dropped a rupee,--Kim could hear the clink,--and strode
into the house, never turning round. Swiftly Kim took up the money; but,
for all his training, he was Irish enough by birth to reckon silver the
least part of any game. What he desired was the visible effect of
action; so, instead of slinking away, he lay close in the grass and
wormed nearer to the house.
He saw--Indian bungalows are open through and through--the Englishman
return to a small dressing-room, in a corner of the veranda, that was
half-office, littered with papers and despatch-boxes, and sit down to
study Mahbub Ali's message. His face, by the full ray of the kerosene
lamp, changed and darkened, and Kim, used as every beggar must be to
watching countenances, took good note.
'Will! Will, dear!' called a woman's voice. 'You ought to be in the
drawing-room. They'll be here in a minute.'
The man still read intently.
'Will!' said the voice, five minutes later. 'He's come. I can hear the
troopers in the drive.'
The man dashed out bareheaded as a big landau with four native troopers
behind it halted at the veranda, and a tall, black-haired man, erect as
an arrow, swung out, preceded by a young officer who laughed pleasantly.
Flat on his belly lay Kim, almost touching the high wheels. His man and
the black stranger exchanged two sentences.
'Certainly, sir,' said the young officer promptly. 'Everything waits
while a horse is concerned.'
'We shan't be more than twenty minutes,' said Kim's man. 'You can do the
honours--keep 'em amused, and all that.'
'Tell one of the troopers to wait,' said the tall man, and they both
passed into the dressing-room together as the landau rolled away. Kim
saw their heads bent over Mahbub Ali's message, and heard the
voices--one low and deferential, the other sharp and decisive.
'It isn't a question of weeks. It is a question of days--hours almost,'
said the elder. 'I'd been expecting it for some time, but this'--he
tapped Mahbub Ali's paper--'clenches it. Grogan's dining here to-night,
isn't he?'
'Yes, sir, and Macklin too.'
'Very good. I'll speak to them myself. That matter will be referred to
the Council, of course, but this is a case where one is justified in
assuming that we take action at once. Warn the Pindi and Peshawur
brigades. It will disorganise all the summer reliefs, but we can't help
that. This comes of not smashing them thoroughly the first time. Eight
thousand should be enough.'
'What about artillery, sir?'
'I must consult Macklin.'
'Then it means war?'
'No. Punishment. When a man is bound by the action of his predecessor--'
'But C.25 may have lied.'
'He bears out the other's information. Practically, they showed their
hand six months back. But Devenish would have it there was a chance of
peace. Of course they used it to make themselves stronger. Send off
those telegrams at once,--the new code, not the old,--mine and
Wharton's. I don't think we need keep the ladies waiting any longer. We
can settle the rest over the cigars. I thought it was coming. It's
punishment--not war.'
As the trooper cantered off Kim crawled round to the back of the house,
where, going on his Lahore experiences, he judged there would be
food--and information. The kitchen was crowded with excited scullions,
one of whom kicked him.
'Aie,' said Kim, feigning tears. 'I came only to wash dishes in return
for a bellyful.'
'All Umballa is on the same errand. Get hence. They go in now with the
soup. Think you that we who serve Creighton Sahib need strange scullions
to help us through a big dinner?'
'It is a very big dinner;' said Kim, looking at the plates.
'Small wonder. The guest of honour is none other than the Jang-i-Lat
Sahib' (the Commander-in-Chief).
'Ho!' said Kim, with the correct guttural note of wonder. He had learned
what he wanted, and when the scullion turned he was gone.
'And all that trouble,' said he to himself, thinking as usual in
Hindustanee, 'for a horse's pedigree! Mahbub Ali should have come to me
to learn a little lying. Every time before that I have borne a message
it concerned a woman. Now it is men. Better. The tall man said that they
will loose a great army to punish some one--somewhere--the news goes to
Pindi and Peshawur. There are also guns. Would I had crept nearer. It is
big news!'
He returned to find the cultivator's cousin's younger brother discussing
the family law-suit in all its bearings with the cultivator and his wife
and a few friends, while the lama dozed. After the evening meal some one
passed him a water-pipe; and Kim felt very much of a man as he pulled at
the smooth cocoanut-shell, his legs spread abroad in the moonlight, his
tongue clicking in remarks from time to time. His hosts were most
polite; for the cultivator's wife had told them of his vision of the Red
Bull, and of his probable descent from another world. Moreover, the lama
was a great and venerable curiosity. The family priest, an old, tolerant
Sarsut Brahmin, dropped in later, and naturally started a theological
argument to impress the family. By creed, of course, they were all on
their priest's side, but the lama was the guest and the novelty. His
gentle kindliness, and his impressive Chinese quotations, that sounded
like spells, delighted them hugely; and in this sympathetic, simple air
he expanded like the Bodhisat's own lotus, speaking of his life in the
great hills of Suchzen, before, as he said, 'I rose up to seek
enlightenment.'
Then it came out that in those worldly days he had been a master-hand at
casting horoscopes and nativities; and the family priest led him on to
describe his methods; each giving the planets names that the other could
not understand, and pointing upwards as the big stars sailed across the
dark. The children of the house tugged unrebuked at his rosary; and he
clean forgot the Rule which forbids looking at women as he talked of
enduring snows, landslips, blocked passes, the remote cliffs where men
find sapphires and turquoise, and that wonderful upland road that leads
at last into Great China itself.
'How thinkest thou of this one?' said the cultivator aside to the
priest.
'A holy man--a holy man indeed. His Gods are not the Gods, but his feet
are upon the Way,' was the answer. 'And his methods of nativities,
though that is beyond thee, are wise and sure.'
'Tell me,' said Kim lazily, 'whether I find my Red Bull on a green
field, as was promised me.'
'What knowledge hast thou of thy birth-hour?' the priest asked, swelling
with importance.
'Between first and second cockcrow of the first night in May.'
'Of what year?'
'I do not know; but upon the hour that I cried first fell the great
earthquake in Srinagur which is in Kashmir.' This Kim had from the woman
who took care of him, and she again from Kimball O'Hara. The earthquake
had been felt in India, and for long stood a leading date in the Punjab.
'Ai!' said a woman excitedly. This seemed to make Kim's supernatural
origin more certain. 'Was not such an one's daughter born then--'
'And her mother bore her husband four sons in four years--all likely
boys,' cried the cultivator's wife, sitting outside the circle in the
shadow.
'None reared in the knowledge,' said the family priest, 'forget how the
planets stood in their Houses upon that night.' He began to draw in the
dust of the courtyard. 'At least thou hast good claim to a half of the
House of the Bull. How runs thy prophecy?'
'Upon a day,' said Kim, delighted at the sensation he was creating, 'I
shall be made great by means of a Red Bull on a green field, but first
there will enter two men making all things ready.'
'Yes: thus ever at the opening of a vision. A thick darkness that clears
slowly; anon one enters with a broom making ready the place. Then begins
the Sight. Two men--thou sayest? Ay, ay. The Sun, leaving the House of
the Bull, enters that of the Twins. Hence the two men of the prophecy.
Let us now consider. Fetch me a twig, little one.'
He knitted his brows, scratched, smoothed out, and scratched again in
the dust mysterious signs--to the wonder of all save the lama, who, with
fine instinct, forbore to interfere.
At the end of half an hour he tossed the twig from him with a grunt.
'Hm. Thus say the stars. Within three days come the two men to make all
things ready. After them follows the Bull; but the sign over against him
is the sign of War and armed men.'
'There was indeed a man of the Loodhiana Sikhs in the carriage from
Lahore,' said the cultivator's wife hopefully.
'Tck! Armed men--many hundreds. What concern hast thou with war?' said
the priest to Kim. 'Thine is a red and an angry sign of War to be loosed
very soon.'
'None--none,' said the lama earnestly. 'We seek only peace and our
River.'
Kim smiled, remembering what he had overheard in the dressing-room.
Decidedly he was a favourite of the stars.
The priest brushed his foot over the rude horoscope. 'More than this I
cannot see. In three days comes the Bull to thee, boy.'
'And my River, my River,' pleaded the lama. 'I had hoped his Bull would
lead us both to the River.'
'Alas, for that wondrous River, my brother,' the priest replied. 'Such
things are not common.'
Next morning, though they were pressed to stay, the lama insisted on
departure. They gave Kim a large bundle of good food and nearly three
annas in copper money for the needs of the road, and with many blessings
watched the two go southward in the dawn.
'Pity it is that these and such as these could not be freed from the
Wheel of Things,' said the lama.
'Nay, then would only evil people be left on the earth, and who would
give us meat and shelter?' quoth Kim, stepping merrily under his burden.
'Yonder is a small stream. Let us look,' said the lama, and he led from
the white road across the fields; walking into a very hornets'-nest of
pariah dogs.