Kim

Kim

He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gherthe 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 conquerors loot. There was some justification for Kimhe had kicked Lala Dinanaths boy off the trunnionssince 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 whitea 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 Kims mothers sister; but his mother had been nursemaid in a Colonels family and had married Kimball OHara, 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 OHara 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 OHara 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 papersone he called his ne varietur because those words were written below his signature thereon, and another his clearance-certificate. The third was Kims 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 magicsuch magic as men practised over yonder behind the Museum, in the big blue-and-white Jadoo-Gherthe Magic House, as we name the Masonic Lodge. It would, he said, all come right some day, and Kims horn would be exalted between pillarsmonstrous pillarsof beauty and strength. The Colonel himself, riding on a horse, at the head of the finest Regiment in the world, would attend to Kimlittle 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 OHarapoor OHara 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-certificate into a leather amulet-case which she strung round Kims neck. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 2226
Author: Kipling, Rudyard
Release Date: Jun 1, 2000
Format: eBook
Language: English