Rudyard Kipling

KIM
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Chapter 2

 “For whoso will, from Pride released,
   Contemning neither creed nor priest,
 May hear the Soul of all the East
   About him at Kamakura.”
 

 

They entered the fort-like railway station, black in the end of night; the electrics sizzling over the goods yard where they handle the heavy Northern grain-traffic.

“This is the work of devils!” said the lama, recoiling from the hollow echoing darkness, the glimmer of rails between the masonry platforms, and the maze of girders above. He stood in a gigantic stone hall paved, it seemed, with the sheeted dead — third-class passengers who had taken their tickets overnight and were sleeping in the waiting-rooms. All hours of the twenty-four are alike to Orientals, and their passenger traffic is regulated accordingly.

“This is where the fire-carriages come. One stands behind that hole” — Kim pointed to the ticket-office — “who will give thee a paper to take thee to Umballa.

“But we go to Benares,” he replied petulantly.

“All one. Benares then. Quick: she comes!”

“Take thou the purse.”

The lama, not so well used to trains as he had pretended, started as the 3.25 a.m. south bound roared in. The sleepers sprang to life, and the station filled with clamour and shoutings, cries of water and sweetmeat vendors, shouts of native policemen, and shrill yells of women gathering up their baskets, their families, and their husbands.

“It is the train — only the te-rain. It will come here. Wait!” Amazed at the lama’s immense simplicity (he had handed him a small bag full of rupees), Kim asked and paid for a ticket to Umballa. A sleepy clerk grunted and flung out a ticket to the next station, just six miles distant.

“Nay,” said Kim, scanning it with a grin. “This may serve for farmers, but I live in the city of Lahore. It was cleverly done, babu. Now give the ticket to Umballa.”

The babu scowled and dealt the proper ticket.

“Now another to Amritzar,” said Kim, who had no notion of spending Mahbub Ali’s money on anything so crude as a paid ride to Umballa. “The price is so much. The small money in return is just so much. I know the ways of the terain.... Never did yogi need chela as thou dost,” he went on merrily to the bewildered lama. “They would have flung thee out at Mian Mir but for me. This way! Come.” He returned the money, keeping only one anna in each rupee of the price of the Umballa ticket as his commission — the immemorial commission of Asia.

The lama jibbed at the open door of a crowded third-class carriage. “Were it not better to walk?” said he weakly.

A burly Sikh artisan thrust forth his bearded head. “Is he afraid? Do not be afraid. I remember the time when I was afraid of the te-rain. Enter! This thing is the work of the Government.”

“I do not fear,” said the lama. “Have ye room within for two?”

“There is no room even for a mouse,” shrilled the wife of a well-to-do cultivator — a Hindu Jat from the rich Jullundur district. “Our night trains are not as well looked (...)

(......)