k
have given up tending their betters. The remedy is sleep, and certain
drugs,' said the Sahiba; and he was glad to give himself up to the
blankness that half menaced and half soothed him.

She brewed drinks, in some mysterious Asiatic equivalent to the
still-room--drenches that smelt pestilently and tasted worse. She
stood over Kim till they went down, and inquired exhaustively after
they had come up. She laid a taboo upon the forecourt, and enforced it
by means of an armed man. It is true he was seventy odd, that his
scabbarded sword ceased at the hilt; but he represented the authority
of the Sahiba, and loaded wains, chattering servants, calves, dogs,
hens, and the like, fetched a wide compass by those parts. Best of
all, when the body was cleared, she cut out from the mass of poor
relations that crowded the back of the buildings--house-hold dogs, we
name them--a cousin's widow, skilled in what Europeans, who know
nothing about it, call massage. And the two of them, laying him east
and west, that the mysterious earth-currents which thrill the clay of
our bodies might help and not hinder, took him to pieces all one long
afternoon--bone by bone, muscle by muscle, ligament by ligament, and
lastly, nerve by nerve. Kneaded to irresponsible pulp, half hypnotized
by the perpetual flick and readjustment of the uneasy chudders that
veiled their eyes, Kim slid ten thousand miles into slumber--thirty-six
hours of it--sleep that soaked like rain after drought.

Then she fed him, and the house spun to her clamour. She caused fowls
to be slain; she sent for vegetables, and the sober, slow-thinking
gardener, nigh as old as she, sweated for it; she took spices, and
milk, and onion, with little fish from the brooks--anon limes for
sherbets, fat quails from the pits, then chicken-livers upon a skewer,
with sliced ginger between.

'I have seen something of this world,' she said over the crowded trays,
'and there are but two sorts of women in it--those who take the
strength out of a man and those who put it back. Once I was that one,
and now I am this. Nay--do not play the priestling with me. Mine was
but a jest. If it does not hold good now, it will when thou takest the
road again. Cousin,'--this to the poor relation, never wearied of
extolling her patroness's charity--'he is getting a bloom on the skin
of a new-curried horse. Our work is like polishing jewels to be thrown
to a dance-girl--eh?'

Kim sat up and smiled.