have I seen such a man as thou art,' Kim whispered, overwhelmed.
'Do the very snakes understand thy talk?'

'Who knows?' He passed within a foot of the cobra's poised head. It
flattened itself among the dusty coils.

'Come, thou!' he called over his shoulder.

'Not I,' said Kim'. 'I go round.'

'Come. He does no hurt.'

Kim hesitated for a moment. The lama backed his order by some droned
Chinese quotation which Kim took for a charm. He obeyed and bounded
across the rivulet, and the snake, indeed, made no sign.

'Never have I seen such a man.' Kim wiped the sweat from his forehead.
'And now, whither go we?'

'That is for thee to say. I am old, and a stranger--far from my own
place. But that the rail-carriage fills my head with noises of
devil-drums I would go in it to Benares now ... Yet by so going we may
miss the River. Let us find another river.'

Where the hard-worked soil gives three and even four crops a year
through patches of sugar-cane, tobacco, long white radishes, and
nol-kol, all that day they strolled on, turning aside to every glimpse
of water; rousing village dogs and sleeping villages at noonday; the
lama replying to the volleyed questions with an unswerving simplicity.
They sought a River: a River of miraculous healing. Had any one
knowledge of such a stream?

Sometimes men laughed, but more often heard the story out to the end
and offered them a place in the shade, a drink of milk, and a meal.
The women were always kind, and the little children as children are the
world over, alternately shy and venturesome.

Evening found them at rest under the village tree of a mud-walled,
mud-roofed hamlet, talking to the headman as the cattle came in from
the grazing-grounds and the women prepared the day's last meal. They
had passed beyond the belt of market-gardens round hungry Umballa, and
were among the mile-wide green of the staple crops.

He was a white-bearded and affable elder, used to entertaining
strangers. He dragged out a string bedstead for the lama, set warm
cooked food before him, prepared him a pipe, and, the evening
ceremonies being finished in the village temple, sent for the village
priest.

Kim told the older children tales of the size and beauty of Lahore, of
railway travel, and such-like city things, while the men talked, slowly
as their cattle chew the cud.

'I cannot fathom it,' said the headman at last to the priest. 'How
readest thou this talk?' The lama, hi