he
says he is a fearful man ... And he is a fearful man. I must get into
the world again.'

At first his legs bent like bad pipe-stems, and the flood and rush of
the sunlit air dazzled him. He squatted by the white wall, the mind
rummaging among the incidents of the long dooli journey, the lama's
weaknesses, and, now that the stimulus of talk was removed, his own
self-pity, of which, like the sick, he had great store. The unnerved
brain edged away from all the outside, as a raw horse, once rowelled,
sidles from the spur. It was enough, amply enough, that the spoil of
the kilta was away--off his hands--out of his possession. He tried to
think of the lama--to wonder why he had tumbled into a brook--but the
bigness of the world, seen between the forecourt gates, swept linked
thought aside. Then he looked upon the trees and the broad fields,
with the thatched huts hidden among crops--looked with strange eyes
unable to take up the size and proportion and use of things--stared for
a still half-hour. All that while he felt, though he could not put it
into words, that his soul was out of gear with its surroundings--a
cog-wheel unconnected with any machinery, just like the idle cog-wheel
of a cheap Beheea sugar-crusher laid by in a corner. The breezes
fanned over him, the parrots shrieked at him, the noises of the
populated house behind--squabbles, orders, and reproofs--hit on dead
ears.

'I am Kim. I am Kim. And what is Kim?' His soul repeated it again
and again.

He did not want to cry--had never felt less like crying in his
life--but of a sudden easy, stupid tears trickled down his nose, and
with an almost audible click he felt the wheels of his being lock up
anew on the world without. Things that rode meaningless on the eyeball
an instant before slid into proper proportion. Roads were meant to be
walked upon, houses to be lived in, cattle to be driven, fields to be
tilled, and men and women to be talked to. They were all real and
true--solidly planted upon the feet--perfectly comprehensible--clay of
his clay, neither more nor less. He shook himself like a dog with a
flea in his ear, and rambled out of the gate. Said the Sahiba, to whom
watchful eyes reported this move: 'Let him go. I have done my share.
Mother Earth must do the rest. When the Holy One comes back from
meditation, tell him.'

There stood an empty bullock-cart on a little knoll half a mile away,
with a young banyan tree behind--a look-ou