“Where goest thou?” he called after Kim.
“No whither—it was a small march, and all this”—Kim waved his hands abroad—“is new to me.”
“She is beyond question a wise and a discerning woman. But it is hard to meditate when—”
“All women are thus.” Kim spoke as might have Solomon.
“Before the lamassery was a broad platform,” the lama muttered, looping up the well-worn rosary, “of stone. On that I have left the marks of my feet—pacing to and fro with these.”
He clicked the beads, and began the Om mane pudme hum of his devotion; grateful for the cool, the quiet, and the absence of dust.
One thing after another drew Kim’s idle eye across the plain. There was no purpose in his wanderings, except that the build of the huts near by seemed new, and he wished to investigate.
They came out on a broad tract of grazing-ground, brown and purple in the afternoon light, with a heavy clump of mangoes in the centre. It struck Kim as curious that no shrine stood in so eligible a spot: the boy was observing as any priest for these things. Far across the plain walked side by side four men, made small by the distance. He looked intently under his curved palms and caught the sheen of brass.
“Soldiers. White soldiers!” said he. “Let us see.”
“It is always soldiers when thou and I go out alone together. But I have never seen the white soldiers.”
“They do no harm except when they are drunk. Keep behind this tree.”