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Kim

by Rudyard 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-

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