to do. I am at Shamlegh-under-the-Snow. The old man is sick.’
‘Take this to him. It will altogether shut his mouth. He cannot have gone far.’
‘Indeed no. They are still in the forest across the spur. Our children went to watch them when the light came, and have cried the news as they moved.’
Kim looked his astonishment; but from the edge of the sheep-pasture floated a shrill, kite-like trill. A child tending cattle had picked it up from a brother or sister on the far side of the slope that commanded Chini valley.
‘My husbands are also out there gathering wood.’ She drew a handful of walnuts from her bosom, split one neatly, and began to eat. Kim affected blank ignorance.
‘Dost thou not know the meaning of the walnut—priest?’ she said coyly, and handed him the half-shells.
‘Well thought of.’ He slipped the piece of paper between them quickly. ‘Hast thou a little wax to close them on this letter?’
The woman sighed aloud, and Kim relented.
‘There is no payment till service has been rendered. Carry this to the Babu, and say it was sent by the Son of the Charm.’
‘Ai! Truly! Truly! By a magician—who is like a Sahib.’
‘Nay, Son of the Charm: and ask if there be any answer.’
‘But if he offer a rudeness? I—I am afraid.’
Kim laughed. ‘He is, I have no doubt, very tired and very hungry. The Hills make cold bedfellows. Hai, my’—it was on the tip of his tongue to say Mother, but he turned it to Sister—‘thou art a wise and witty woman. By this time all the villages know what has befallen the Sahibs—eh?’
‘True. News was at Ziglaur by midnight, and by to-morrow should be at Kotgarh. The villages are both afraid and angry.’
‘No need. Tell the villages to feed the Sahibs and pass them on, in peace. We must get them quietly away from our valleys. To steal is one thing—to kill another. The Babu will understand, and there will be no after-complaints. Be swift. I must tend my master when he wakes.’
‘So be it. After service—thou hast said?—comes the reward. I am the Woman of Shamlegh, and I hold from the Rajah. I am no common bearer of babes. Shamlegh is thine: hoof and horn and hide, milk and butter. Take or leave.’
She turned resolutely uphill, her silver necklaces clicking on her broad breast, to meet the morning sun fifteen hundred feet above them. This time Kim thought in the vernacular as he waxed down the oilskin edges of the packets.
‘How can a man follow the Way or the Great Game when he is eternally pestered by women? There was that girl at Akrola by the Ford; and there was the scullion’s wife behind the dovecot—not counting the others—and now comes this one! When I was a child it was well enough, but now I am a man and they will not regard me as a man. Walnuts indeed! Ho! ho! It is almonds in the Plains!’
He went out to levy on the village—not with a begging-bowl, which might do for down-country, but in the manner of a prince. Shamlegh’s summer population is only three families—four women and eight or nine men. They were all full of tinned meats—and mixed drinks, from ammoniated quinine to white vodka—for they had taken their full share in the overnight loot. The neat Continental tents had been cut up and shared long ago, and there were patent aluminium saucepans abroad.
But they considered the lama’s presence a perfect safeguard against all consequences, and impenitently brought Kim of their best—even to a drink of chang—the barley-beer that comes from Ladakh-way. Then they thawed out in the sun, and sat with their legs hanging over infinite abysses, chattering, laughing, and smoking. They judged India and its Government solely from their experience of wandering Sahibs who had employed them or their friends as shikarris. Kim heard tales of shots missed upon ibex, serow, or markhor, by Sahibs twenty years in their graves—every detail lighted from behind like twigs on tree-tops seen against lightning. They told him of their little diseases, and, more important, the diseases of their tiny, sure-footed cattle; of trips as far as Kotgarh, where the strange missionaries live, and beyond even to marvellous Simla, where the streets are paved with silver, and any one, look you, can get service with the Sahibs, who ride about in two-wheeled carts and spend money with a spade. Presently, grave and aloof, walking very heavily, the lama joined himself to the chatter under the eaves, and they gave him great room. The thin air refreshed him, and he sat on the edge of precipices with the best of them, and, when talk languished, flung pebbles into the void. Thirty miles away, as the eagle flies, lay the next range, seamed and channelled and pitted with little patches of brush—forests, each a day’s dark march. Behind the village, Shamlegh hill itself cut off all view to southward. It was like sitting in a swallow’s nest under the eaves of the roof of the world.
From time to time the lama stretched out his hand, and with a little, low-voiced prompting would point out the road to Spiti and north across the Parungla.
‘Beyond, where the hills lie thickest, lies De-ch’en’ (he meant Han-lé), ‘the great Monastery. s’Tag-stan-ras-ch’en built it, and of him there runs this tale.’ Whereupon he told it: a fantastic piled narrative of bewitchment and miracles that set Shamlegh agasping. Turning west a little, he speered for the green hills of Kulu, and sought Kailung under the glaciers. ‘For thither came I in the old, old days. From Leh I came, over the Baralachi.’
‘Yes, yes; we know it,’ said the far-faring people of Shamlegh.
‘And I slept two nights with the priests of Kailung. These are the hills of my delight! Shadows blessed above all other shadows! There my eyes opened on this world; there my eyes were opened to this world; there I found Enlightenment; and there I girt my loins for my Search. Out of the Hills I came—the high Hills and the strong winds. Oh, just is the Wheel!’ He blessed them in detail—the great glaciers, the naked rocks, the piled moraines and tumbled shale; dry upland, hidden salt-lake, age-old timber and fruitful water-shot valley one after the other, as a dying man blesses his folk, and Kim marvelled at his passion.
‘Yes—yes. There is no place like our Hills,’ said the people of Shamlegh. And they fell to wondering how a man could live in the hot terrible Plains where the cattle run as big as elephants, unfit to plough on a hillside; where village touches village, they had heard, for a hundred miles; where folk went about stealing in gangs, and what the robbers spared the Police carried utterly away.
So the still forenoon wore through, and at the end of it Kim’s messenger dropped from the steep pasture as unbreathed as when she had set out.
‘I sent a word to the hakim,’ Kim explained, while she made reverence.
‘He joined himself to the idolaters? Nay, I remember he did a healing upon one of them. He has acquired merit, though the healed employed his strength for evil. Just is the Wheel! What of the hakim?’
‘I feared that thou hadst been bruised and—and I knew he was wise.’ Kim took the waxed walnut-shell and read in English on the back of his note: Your favour received. Cannot get away from present company at present, but shall take them into Simla. After which, hope to rejoin you. Inexpedient to follow angry gentlemen. Return by same road you came, and will overtake. Highly gratified about correspondence due to my forethought.’ He says, Holy One, that he will escape from the idolaters, and will return to us. Shall we wait awhile at Shamlegh, then?’
The lama looked long and lovingly upon the hills and shook his head.
‘That may not be, chela. From my bones outward I do desire it, but it is forbidden. I have seen the Cause of Things.’
‘Why? When the Hills gave thee back thy strength day by day? Remember we were weak and fainting down below there in the Doon.’
‘I became strong to do evil and to forget. A brawler and a swashbuckler upon the hillsides was I.’ Kim bit back a smile. ‘Just and perfect is the Wheel, swerving not a hair. When I was a man—a long time ago—I did