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By Root 4632 0

has skill. I am refreshed all over. When we reach the lower hills I shall be yet stronger. The hakim spoke truly to me this morn when he said a breath from the snows blows away twenty years from the life of a man. We will go up into the Hills—the high hills—up to the sound of snow-waters and the sound of the trees—for a little while. The hakim said that at any time we may return to the Plains, for we do no more than skirt the pleasant places. The hakim is full of learning; but he is in no way proud. I spoke to him—when thou wast talking to the Sahiba—of a certain dizziness that lays hold upon the back of my neck in the night, and he said it rose from excessive heat—to be cured by cool air. Upon consideration, I marvelled that I had not thought of such a simple remedy.’

‘Didst thou tell him of thy Search?’ said Kim, a little jealously. He preferred to sway the lama by his own speech—not through the wiles of Hurree Babu.

‘Assuredly. I told him of my dream, and of the manner by which I had acquired merit by causing thee to be taught wisdom.’

‘Thou didst not say I was a Sahib?’

‘What need? I have told thee many times we be but two souls seeking escape. He said—and he is just herein—that the River of Healing will break forth even as I dreamed—at my feet, if need be. Having found the Way, seest thou, that shall free me from the Wheel, need I trouble to find a way about the mere fields of the earth—which are Illusion? That were senseless. I have my dreams, night upon night repeated; I have the Jâtaka; and I have thee, Friend of all the World. It was written in thy horoscope that a Red Bull on a green field—I have not forgotten—should bring thee to honour. Who but I saw that prophecy accomplished? Indeed, I was the instrument. Thou shalt find me my River, being in return the instrument. The Search is sure!’

He set his ivory-yellow face, serene and untroubled, towards the beckoning Hills; his shadow shouldering far before him in the dust.

Chapter XIII

Who hath desired the Sea—the immense and contemptuous

surges?

The shudder, the stumble, the swerve ere the star-stabbing

bowsprit emerges—

The orderly clouds of the Trades and the ridged roaring

sapphire thereunder—

Unheralded cliff-lurking flaws and the head-sails’ low-volleying

thunder?

His Sea in no wonder the same—his Sea and the same in each

wonder—

His Sea that his being fulfils?

So and no otherwise—so and no otherwise hill-men desire

their Hills!

The Sea and the Hills.

Who goes to the Hills goes to his mother.’ They had crossed the Siwaliks and the half-tropical Doon, left Mussoorie behind them, and headed north along the narrow hill-roads. Day after day they struck deeper into the huddled mountains, and day after day Kim watched the lama return to a man’s strength. Among the terraces of the Doon he had leaned on the boy’s shoulder, ready to profit by wayside halts. Under the great ramp to Mussoorie he drew himself together as an old hunter faces a well-remembered bank, and where he should have sunk exhausted swung his long draperies about him, drew a deep double-lungful of the diamond air, and walked as only a hillman can. Kim, plains-bred and plains-fed, sweated and panted astonished. ‘This is my country,’ said the lama. ’Beside Such-zen, this is flatter than a rice-field’; and with steady, driving strokes from the loins he strode upwards. But it was on the steep downhill marches, three thousand feet in three hours, that he went utterly away from Kim, whose back ached with holding back, and whose big toe was nigh cut off by his grass sandal-string. Through the speckled shadow of the great deodar-forests; through oak feathered and plumed with ferns; birch, ilex, rhododendron, and pine, out on to the bare hillsides’ slippery sunburnt grass, and back into the woodlands’ coolth again, till oak gave way to bamboo and palm of the valley, the lama swung untiring.

Glancing back in the twilight at the huge ridges behind him and the faint, thin line of the road whereby they had come, he would lay out, with a hillman’s generous breadth of vision, fresh