Page:Kim - Rudyard Kipling (1912).djvu/247

Rh '''O Hearer! Thou that hearest with ears. Be present. Listen, O Hearer!''' Huneefa moaned, her dead eyes turned to the west. The dark room filled with meanings and snortings.

From the outer balcony, a ponderous figure raised a round bullet head and coughed nervously.

'Do not interrupt this ventriloquial necromanciss, my friend,' it said in English. 'I opine that it is very disturbing to you, but no enlightened observer is jolly well upset.'

'. . . ''I will lay a plot for their ruin! prophet, bear with the unbelievers. Let them alone a while!''' Huneefa's face, turned to the northward, worked horribly, and it was as though voices from the ceiling answered her.

Hurree Babu returned to his note-book, balanced on the window sill, but his hand shook. Huneefa, in some sort of drugged ecstasy, wrenched herself to and fro as she sat cross-legged by Kim's still head, and called upon devil after devil, in the ancient order of the ritual, binding them to avoid the boy's every action.

'''With him are the keys of the secret things! None knoweth them beside himself. He knoweth that which is in the dry land and in the sea!''' Again broke out the unearthly whistling responses.

'I—I apprehend it is not at all malignant in its operation?' said the Babu, watching the throat-muscles quiver and jerk as Huneefa spoke with tongues. 'It—it is not likely that she has killed the boy? If so, I decline to be witness at the trial What was the last hypothetical devil mentioned?'

'Babuji,' said Mahbub in the vernacular. 'I have no regard for the devils of Hind, but the sons of Eblis are far otherwise, and whether they be jumalee (well-affected) or jullalee (terrible) they love not Katfirs.'

'Then you think I had better go?' said Hurree Babu, half