bad words they climbed up the steep incline and plunged on to the hard main road, carter reviling carter. It was equally beautiful to watch the people, little clumps of red and blue and pink and white and saffron, turning aside to go to their own villages, dispersing and growing small by twos and threes across the level plain. Kim felt these things, though he could not give tongue to his feelings, and so contented himself with buying peeled sugarcane and spitting the pith generously about his path. From time to time the lama took snuff, and at last Kim could endure the silence no longer.
“This is a good land—the land of the South!” said he. “The air is good; the water is good. Eh?”
“And they are all bound upon the Wheel,” said the lama. “Bound from life after life. To none of these has the Way been shown.” He shook himself back to this world.
“And now we have walked a weary way,” said Kim. “Surely we shall soon come to a parao . Shall we stay there? Look, the sun is sloping.”
“Who will receive us this evening?”
“That is all one. This country is full of good folk. Besides,” he sunk his voice beneath a whisper—“we have money.”
The crowd thickened as they neared the resting-place which marked the end of their day’s journey. A line of stalls selling very simple food and tobacco, a stack of firewood, a police-station, a well, a horse-trough, a few trees, and, under them, some trampled ground dotted with the black ashes of old fires, are all that mark a parao on the Grand Trunk; if you except the beggars and the crows—both hungry.
By this time the sun was driving broad golden spokes through the lower branches of the mango-trees; the parakeets and doves were coming home