Kipling
Chapter I
O ye who tread the Narrow Way By Tophet-flare to judgment Day, Be gentle when 'the
heathen' pray To Buddha at Kamakura!
Buddha at Kamakura.
He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam Zammah on her brick
platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher - the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore
Museum. Who hold Zam-Zammah, that 'fire-breathing dragon', hold the Punjab, for the
great green-bronze piece is always first of the conqueror's loot.
There was some justification for Kim - he had kicked Lala Dinanath's boy off the
trunnions - since the English held the Punjab and Kim was English. Though he was
burned black as any native; though he spoke the vernacular by preference, and his
mother-tongue in a clipped uncertain sing-song; though he consorted on terms of perfect
equality with the small boys of the bazar; Kim was white - a poor white of the very
poorest. The half-caste woman who looked after him (she smoked opium, and pretended
to keep a second-hand furniture shop by the square where the cheap cabs wait) told the
missionaries that she was Kim's mother's sister; but his mother had been nursemaid in a
Colonel's family and had married Kimball O'Hara, a young colour- sergeant of the
Mavericks, an Irish regiment. He afterwards took a post on the Sind, Punjab, and Delhi
Railway, and his Regiment went home without him. The wife died of cholera in
Ferozepore, and O'Hara fell to drink and loafing up and down the line with the keen-eyed
three-year-old baby. Societies and chaplains, anxious for the child, tried to catch him, but
O'Hara drifted away, till he came across the woman who took opium and learned the taste
from her, and died as poor whites die in India. His estate at death consisted of three
papers - one he called his 'ne varietur' because those words were written below his
signature thereon, and another his 'clearance-certificate'. The third was Kim's
birth-certificate. Those things, he was used to say, in his glorious opium-hours, would yet
make little Kimball a man. On no account was Kim to part with them, for they belonged
to a great piece of magic - such magic as men practised over yonder behind the Museum,
in the big blue-and-white Jadoo-Gher - the Magic House, as we name the Masonic Lodge.
It would, he said, all come right some day, and Kim's horn would be exalted between
pillars - monstrous pillars - of beauty and strength. The Colonel himself, riding on a horse,
at the head of the finest Regiment in the world, would attend to Kim - little Kim that
should have been better off than his father. Nine hundred first-class devils, whose God
was a Red Bull on a green field, would attend to Kim, if they had not forgotten O'Hara -
poor O'Hara that was gang- foreman on the Ferozepore line. Then he would weep bitterly
in the broken rush chair on the veranda. So it came about after his death that the woman
sewed parchment, paper, and birth- certificate into a leather amulet-case which she strung
round Kim's neck.
'And some day,' she said, confusedly remembering O'Hara's prophecies, 'there will come
for you a great Red Bull on a green field, and the Colonel riding on his tall horse, yes,
and' dropping into English - 'nine hundred devils.'
'Ah,' said Kim, 'I shall remember. A Red Bull and a Colonel on a horse will come, but
first, my father said, will come the two men making ready the ground for these matters.
That is how my father said they always did; and it is always so when men work magic.'
If the woman had sent Kim up to the local Jadoo-Gher with those papers, he would, of
course, have been taken over by the Provincial Lodge, and sent to the Masonic
Orphanage in the Hills; but what she had heard of magic she distrusted. Kim, too, held
views of his own. As he reached the years of indiscretion, he learned to avoid
missionaries and white men of serious aspect who asked who he was, and what he did.
For Kim did nothing with an immense success. True, he knew the wonderful walled city
of Lahore from the Delhi Gate to the outer Fort Ditch; was hand in glove with men who
led lives stranger than anything Haroun al Raschid dreamed of; and he lived in a life wild
as that of the Arabian Nights, but missionaries and secretaries of charitable societies
could not see the beauty of it. His nickname through the wards was 'Little Friend of all
the World'; and very often, being lithe and inconspicuous, he executed commissions by
night on the crowded housetops for sleek and shiny young men
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