“Do not forget he made me that I am—though he did not know it. Year by year, he sent the money that taught me.”
“I would have done as much—had it struck my thick head,” Mahbub growled. “Come away. The lamps are lit now, and none will mark thee in the bazaar. We go to Huneefa’s house.”
On the way thither, Mahbub gave him much the same sort of advice as his mother gave to Lemuel, and curiously enough, Mahbub was exact to point out how Huneefa and her likes destroyed kings.
“And I remember,” he quoted maliciously, “one who said, ‘Trust a snake before an harlot, and an harlot before a Pathan, Mahbub Ali.’ Now, excepting as to Pathans, of whom I am one, all that is true. Most true is it in the Great Game, for it is by means of women that all plans come to ruin and we lie out in the dawning with our throats cut. So it happened to such a one.” He gave the reddest particulars.
“Then why—?” Kim paused before a filthy staircase that climbed to the warm darkness of an upper chamber, in the ward that is behind Azim Ullah’s tobacco-shop. Those who know it call it The Birdcage—it is so full of whisperings and whistlings and chirrupings.
The room, with its dirty cushions and half-smoked hookahs, smelt abominably of stale tobacco. In one corner lay a huge and shapeless woman clad in greenish gauzes, and decked, brow, nose, ear, neck, wrist, arm, waist, and ankle with heavy native jewellery. When she turned it was like the clashing of copper pots. A lean cat in the balcony outside the window mewed hungrily. Kim checked, bewildered, at the door-curtain.
“Is that the new stuff, Mahbub?” said Huneefa lazily, scarce troubling to remove the mouthpiece from her lips. “O Buktanoos!”—like most of her kind, she swore by the Djinns—“O Buktanoos! He is very good to look upon.”