Rudyad Kipling, Kim, Chapter I By Tophet-flare to ….pdfVIP

Rudyad Kipling, Kim, Chapter I /kipling/kim/ 1/ O ye who tread the Narrow Way By Tophet-flare to judgment Day, Be gentle when the heathen pray To Buddha at Kamakura! Buddha at Kamakura. He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher - the 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 Kim - he had kicked Lala Dinanaths boy off the trunnions - since 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 white - a 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 papers - one 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