being in high condition of grass food, it cost a day and a half to get them together again. Then they met Sikandar Khan coming down with a few unsaleable screws—remnants of his string—and Mahbub, who has more of horse-coping in his little fingernail than Sikandar Khan in all his tents, must needs buy two of the worst, and that meant eight hours’ laborious diplomacy and untold tobacco. But it was all pure delight—the wandering road, climbing, dipping, and sweeping about the growing spurs; the flush of the morning laid along the distant snows; the branched cacti, tier upon tier on the stony hillsides; the voices of a thousand water-channels; the chatter of the monkeys; the solemn deodars, climbing one after another with down-drooped branches; the vista of the Plains rolled out far beneath them; the incessant twanging of the tonga-horns and the wild rush of the led horses when a tonga swung round a curve; the halts for prayers (Mahbub was very religious in dry-washings and bellowings when time did not press); the evening conferences by the halting-places, when camels and bullocks chewed solemnly together and the stolid drivers told the news of the Road—all these things lifted Kim’s heart to song within him.
“But, when the singing and dancing is done,” said Mahbub Ali, “comes the Colonel Sahib’s, and that is not so sweet.”
“A fair land—a most beautiful land is this of Hind—and the land of the Five Rivers is fairer than all,” Kim half chanted. “Into it I will go again if Mahbub Ali or the Colonel lift hand or foot against me. Once gone, who shall find me? Look, Hajji, is yonder the city of Simla? Allah, what a city!”
“My father’s brother, and he was an old man when Mackerson Sahib’s well was new at Peshawur, could recall when there were but two houses in it.”
He led the horses below the main road into the lower Simla bazaar—the crowded rabbit-warren that climbs up from the valley to the Town Hall