light. All day long they lay like molten silver under the
sun, and at evening put on their jewels again. At first they breathed
temperately upon the travellers, winds good to meet when one crawled
over some gigantic hog's-back; but in a few days, at a height of nine
or ten thousand feet, those breezes bit; and Kim kindly allowed a
village of hillmen to acquire merit by giving him a rough blanket-coat.
The lama was mildly surprised that anyone should object to the
knife-edged breezes which had cut the years off his shoulders.

'These are but the lower hills, chela. There is no cold till we come
to the true Hills.'

'Air and water are good, and the people are devout enough, but the food
is very bad,' Kim growled; 'and we walk as though we were mad--or
English. It freezes at night, too.'

'A little, maybe; but only enough to make old bones rejoice in the sun.
We must not always delight in soft beds and rich food.'

'We might at least keep to the road.'

Kim had all a plainsman's affection for the well-trodden track, not six
feet wide, that snaked among the mountains; but the lama, being
Tibetan, could not refrain from short cuts over spurs and the rims of
gravel-strewn slopes. As he explained to his limping disciple, a man
bred among mountains can prophesy the course of a mountain-road, and
though low-lying clouds might be a hindrance to a short-cutting
stranger, they made no earthly difference to a thoughtful man. Thus,
after long hours of what would be reckoned very fair mountaineering in
civilized countries, they would pant over a saddle-back, sidle past a
few landslips, and drop through forest at an angle of forty-five onto
the road again. Along their track lay the villages of the
hillfolk--mud and earth huts, timbers now and then rudely carved with
an axe--clinging like swallows' nests against the steeps, huddled on
tiny flats half-way down a three-thousand-foot glissade; jammed into a
corner between cliffs that funnelled and focused every wandering blast;
or, for the sake of summer pasture, cowering down on a neck that in
winter would be ten feet deep in snow. And the people--the sallow,
greasy, duffle-clad people, with short bare legs and faces almost
Esquimaux--would flock out and adore. The Plains--kindly and
gentle--had treated the lama as a holy man among holy men. But the
Hills worshipped him as one in the confidence of all their devils.
Theirs was an almost obliterated Buddhism, overlaid with a