Page:Kim - Rudyard Kipling (1912).djvu/67

Rh 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 upward 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 converse with women, as he talked of enduring snows, land-slips, 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