The Project Gutenberg EBook of Kim, by Rudyard Kipling

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Title: Kim

Author: Rudyard Kipling

Posting Date: January 15, 2009 [EBook #2226]
Release Date: June, 2000

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK KIM ***

Produced by Patricia Franks, Karyl Basmajian, Nancy K.
Smith, Dave Bruchie.

Kim

by

Rudyard Kipling

JTABLE 4 15 1

Chapter 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 conqueror's loot.

There was some justification for Kim--he had kicked Lala Dinanath's 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 Kim's mother's
sister; but his mother had been nursemaid in a Colonel's family and had
married Kimball O'Hara, 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 O'Hara 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 O'Hara
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--