Page:Kim - Rudyard Kipling (1912).djvu/380

348 head lay powerless upon her breast, and his opened hands surrendered to her strength. The races who shoe their feet with iron and the skins of dead animals, who pack boards and concrete between themselves and the clay of their fashioning, do not understand, except when they go camping, how Earth, that gives all the fevers, can also take them away. The many-rooted tree above him, and even the dead man-handled wood beside him, knew what he sought, as he himself did not know. Hour upon hour he lay deeper than sleep. Towards evening, when the dust of returning kine made all the horizons smoke, came the lama and Mahbub Ali, both afoot, walking cautiously, for the house had told them where he had gone.

'Allah! What a fool's trick to play in open country,' muttered the horse-dealer. 'He could be shot a hundred times—but this is not the Border.'

'And,' said the lama, repeating a many-times-told tale, 'never was such a chela. Temperate, kindly, wise, of ungrudging disposition, a merry heart upon the road, never forgetting, learned, truthful, courteous. Great is his reward!'

'I know the boy—as I have said.'

'And he was all those things?'

'Some of them—but I have not yet found a Red Hat's charm for making him overly truthful. He has certainly been well nursed.'

'The Sahiba is a heart of gold,' said the lama earnestly. 'She looks upon him as her son.'

'Humph! Half Hind seems that way disposed. I only wished to see that the boy had come to no harm and was a free agent. As thou knowest, he and I were old friends in the first days of your pilgrimage together.'