Page:Kim - Rudyard Kipling (1912).djvu/319

Rh and the appalling sweep and dispersal of the cloud-shadows after rain. 'This is no place for men.'

'Long and long ago,' said the lama, as to himself, 'it was asked of the Lord whether the word were everlasting. To this the Excellent One returned no answer. . . . When I was in Ceylon, a wise Seeker confirmed that from the gospel which is written in Pali. Certainly, since we know the way to Freedom, the question was unprofitable, but—look, and know illusion, chela! These are the true hills! They are like the hills by Suchzen. Never were such hills!'

Above them, still enormously above them, earth towered away towards the snow-line, where from east to west across hundreds of miles, ruled as with a ruler, the last of the bold birches stopped. Above that, in scarps and blocks upheaved, the rocks strove to fight their heads above the white smother. Above these again, changeless since the world's beginning, but changing to every mood of sun and cloud, lay out the eternal snow. They could see blots and blurs on its face where storm and wandering wulli-wa got up to dance. Below them, as they stood, the forest slid away in a sheet of blue green for mile upon mile; below the forest was a village in its sprinkle of terraced fields and steep grazing-grounds; below the village they knew, though a thunderstorm worried and growled there for the moment, a pitch of twelve or fifteen hundred feet gave to the moist valley where the streams gather that are the mothers of young Sutlej.

As usual, the lama had led Kim by cow-track and byroad, far from the main route along which Hurree Babu, that 'fearful man,' had bucketed three days before through a storm to which nine Englishmen out of ten would have given full right of way. Hurree was no game shot,—the snick of a trigger made him change