Kim (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) - Rudyard Kipling [152]
There stood an empty bullock-cart on a little knoll half a mile away, with a young banyan tree behind—a look-out, as it were, above some new-ploughed levels; and his eyelids, bathed in soft air, grew heavy as he neared it. The ground was good clean dust—no new herbage that, living, is half-way to death already, but the hopeful dust that holds the seeds of all life. He felt it between his toes, patted it with his palms, and joint by joint, sighing luxuriously, laid him down full length along in the shadow of the wooden-pinned cart. And Mother Earth was as faithful as the Sahiba. She breathed through him to restore the poise he had lost lying so long on a cot cut off from her good currents. His head lay powerless upon her breast, and his opened hands surrendered to her strength. The many-rooted tree above him, and even the dead man-handled wood beside, 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 of 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.’
‘Hmph! 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.’
‘That is a bond between us.’ The lama sat down. ‘We are at the end of the pilgrimage.’
‘No thanks to thee thine was not cut off for good and all a week back. I heard what the Sahiba said to thee when we bore thee up on the cot.’ Mahbub laughed, and tugged his newly dyed beard.
‘I was meditating upon other matters that tide. It was the hakim from Dacca broke my meditations.’
‘Otherwise’—this was in Pushtu364 for decency’s sake—‘thou wouldst have ended thy meditations upon the sultry side of Hell—being an unbeliever and an idolater for all thy child’s simplicity. But now, Red Hat, what is to be done?’
‘This very night,’—the words came slowly, vibrating with triumph,—‘this very night he will be as free as I am from all taint of sin—assured as I am, when he quits this body, of Freedom from the Wheel of Things. I have a sign’—he laid his hand above the torn chart in his bosom—‘that my time is short; but I shall have safeguarded him throughout the years. Remember, I have reached Knowledge, as I told thee only three nights back.’
‘It must be true, as the Tirah priest said when I stole his cousin’s wife, that I am a Sufi [a freethinker]; for here I sit,’ said Mahbub to himself, ‘drinking in blasphemy unthinkable.... I remember the tale. On that, then, he goes to Jannatu l’Adn [the Gardens of Eden] . But how? Wilt thou slay him or drown him in that wonderful river from which the Babu dragged thee?’
‘I was dragged from no river,’ said the lama simply. ‘Thou hast forgotten what befell. I found it by Knowledge.’
‘Oh, ay. True,’ stammered Mahbub, divided between high indignation and enormous mirth. ‘I had forgotten the exact run of what happened. Thou didst find it knowingly.’
‘And to say that I would take life is—not a sin, but a madness simple. My