Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (83 page)

‘Who is that?’ said Kim to his companions.

‘Perhaps it is a man,’ said Abdullah, finger in mouth, staring.

‘Without doubt,’ returned Kim; ‘but he is no man of India that I have ever seen.’

‘A priest, perhaps,’ said Chota Lal, spying the rosary. ‘See! He goes into the Wonder House!’

‘Nay, nay,’ said the policeman, shaking his head. ‘I do not understand your talk.’ The constable spoke Punjabi. ‘Oh, Friend of all the World, what does he say?’

‘Send him hither’ said Kim, dropping from Zam-Zammah, flourishing his bare heels. ‘He is a foreigner, and thou art a buffalo.’

The man turned helplessly and drifted towards the boys. He was old, and his woollen gaberdine still reeked of the stinking artemisia of the mountain passes.

‘O Children, what is that big house?’ he said in very fair Urdu.

‘The Ajaib-Gher, the Wonder House!’ Kim gave him no title  —  such as Lala or Mian. He could not divine the man’s creed.

‘Ah! The Wonder House! Can any enter?’

‘It is written above the door  —  all can enter.’

‘Without payment?’

‘I go in and out. I am no banker,’ laughed Kim.

‘Alas! I am an old man. I did not know.’ Then, fingering his rosary, he half turned to the Museum.

‘What is your caste? Where is your house? Have you come far?’ Kim asked.

‘I came by Kulu  —  from beyond the Kailas  —  but what know you? From the hills where’  —  he sighed  —  ’the air and water are fresh and cool.’

‘Aha! Khitai’ (a Chinaman), said Abdullah proudly. Fook Shing had once chased him out of his shop for spitting at the joss above the boots.

‘Pahari?’ (a hillman), said little Chota Lal.

‘Aye, child  —  a hillman from hills thou’lt never see. Didst hear of Bhotiyal (Tibet)? I am no Khitai, but a Bhotiya (Tibetan), since you must know  —  a lama  —  or, say a guru in your tongue.’

‘A guru from Tibet,’ said Kim. ‘I have not seen such a man. They be Hindus in Tibet, then?’

‘We be followers of the Middle Way, living in peace in our lamasseries, and I go to see the Four Holy Places before I die. Now do you, who are children, know as much as I do who am old.’ He smiled benignantly on the boys.

‘Hast thou eaten?’

He fumbled in his bosom and drew forth a worn wooden begging-bowl. The boys nodded. All priests of their acquaintance begged.

‘I do not wish to eat yet.’ He turned his head like an old tortoise in the sunlight. ‘Is it true that there are many images in the Wonder House of Lahore?’ He repeated the last words as one making sure of an address.

‘That is true,’ said Abdullah. ‘It is full of heathen buts. Thou also art an idolater.’

‘Never mind him,’ said Kim. ‘That is the Government’s house and there is no idolatry in it, but only a Sahib with a white beard. Come with me and I will show.’

‘Strange priests eat boys,’ whispered Chota Lal.

‘And he is a stranger and a but-parast’ (idolater), said Abdullah, the Mohammedan.

Kim laughed. ‘He is new. Run to your mothers’ laps, and be safe. Come!’

Kim clicked round the self-registering turnstile; the old man followed and halted amazed. In the entrance-hall stood the larger figures of the Greco-Buddhist sculptures done, savants know how long since, by forgotten workmen whose hands were feeling, and not unskilfully, for the mysteriously transmitted Grecian touch. There were hundreds of pieces, friezes of figures in relief, fragments of statues and slabs crowded with figures that had encrusted the brick walls of the Buddhist stupas and viharas of the North Country and now, dug up and labelled, made the pride of the Museum. In open-mouthed wonder the lama turned to this and that, and finally checked in rapt attention before a large alto-relief representing a coronation or apotheosis of the Lord Buddha. The Master was represented seated on a lotus the petals of which were so deeply undercut as to show almost detached. Round Him was an adoring hierarchy of kings, elders, and old-time Buddhas. Below were lotus-covered waters with fishes and water-birds. Two butterfly-winged dewas held a wreath over His head; above them another pair supported an umbrella surmounted by the jewelled headdress of the Bodhisat.

‘The Lord! The Lord! It is Sakya Muni himself,’ the lama half sobbed; and under his breath began the wonderful Buddhist invocation:  — 

‘To Him the Way  —  the Law  —  Apart  — 
Whom Maya held beneath her heart
Ananda’s Lord  —  the Bodhisat.’

‘And He is here! The Most Excellent Law is here also! My pilgrimage is well begun. And what work! What work!’

‘Yonder is the Sahib,’ said Kim, and dodged sideways among the cases of the arts and manufacture wing. A white-bearded Englishman was looking at the lama, who gravely turned and saluted him and after some fumbling drew forth a note-book and a scrap of paper.

‘Yes, that is my name,’ smiling at the clumsy, childish print.

‘One of us who had made pilgrimage to the Holy Places  —  he is now Abbot of the Lung-Cho Monastery  —  gave it me,’ stammered the lama. ‘He spoke of these.’ His lean hand moved tremulously round.

‘Welcome, then, O lama from Tibet. Here be the images, and I am here’  —  he glanced at the lama’s face  —  ’to gather knowledge. Come to my office awhile.’ The old man was trembling with excitement.

The office was but a little wooden cubicle partitioned off from the sculpture-lined gallery. Kim laid himself down, his ear against a crack in the heat-split cedar door, and, following his instinct, stretched out to listen and watch.

Most of the talk was altogether above his head. The lama, haltingly at first, spoke to the curator of his own lamassery, the Suchzen, opposite the Painted Rocks, four months’ march away. The curator brought out a huge book of photos and showed him that very place, perched on its crag, overlooking the gigantic valley of many-hued strata.

‘Ay, ay!’ The lama mounted a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles of Chinese work. ‘Here is the little door through which we bring wood before winter. And thou  —  the English know of these things? He who is now Abbot of Lung-Cho told me, but I did not believe. The Lord  —  the Excellent One  —  He has honour here too? And His life is known?’

‘It is all carven upon the stones. Come and see, if thou art rested.’

Out shuffled the lama to the main hall, and, the curator beside him, went through the collection with the reverence of a devotee and the appreciative instinct of a craftsman.

Incident by incident in the beautiful story he identified on the blurred stone, puzzled here and there by the unfamiliar Greek convention, but delighted as a child at each new trove. Where the sequence failed, as in the Annunciation, the curator supplied it from his mound of books  —  French and German, with photographs and reproductions.

Here was the devout Asita, the pendant of Simeon in the Christian story, holding the Holy Child on his knee while mother and father listened; and here were incidents in the legend of the cousin Devadatta. Here was the wicked woman who accused the Master of impurity, all confounded; here was the teaching in the Deer-park; the miracle that stunned the fire-worshippers; here was the Bodhisat in royal state as a prince; the miraculous birth; the death at Kusinagara, where the weak disciple fainted; while there were almost countless repetitions of the meditation under the Bodhi tree; and the adoration of the alms-bowl was everywhere. In a few minutes the curator saw that his guest was no mere bead-telling mendicant, but a scholar of parts. And they went at it all over again, the lama taking snuff, wiping his spectacles, and talking at railway speed in a bewildering mixture of Urdu and Tibetan. He had heard of the travels of the Chinese pilgrims, Fo-Hian and Hwen-Thiang, and was anxious to know if there was any translation of their record. He drew in his breath as he turned helplessly over the pages of Beal and Stanislas Julien. ‘‘Tis all here. A treasure locked.’ Then he composed himself reverently to listen to fragments, hastily rendered into Urdu. For the first time he heard of the labours of European scholars, who by the help of these and a hundred other documents have identified the Holy Places of Buddhism. Then he was shown a mighty map, spotted and traced with yellow. The brown finger followed the curator’s pencil from point to point. Here was Kapilavastu, here the Middle Kingdom, and here Mahabodi, the Mecca of Buddhism; and here was Kusinagara, sad place of the Holy One’s death. The old man bowed his head over the sheets in silence for a while, and the curator lit another pipe. Kim had fallen asleep. When he waked, the talk, still in spate, was more within his comprehension.

‘And thus it was, O Fountain of Wisdom, that I decided to go to the Holy Places which His foot had trod  —  to the Birth-place, even to Kapila; then to Maha Bodhi, which is Buddh Gaya  —  to the Monastery  —  to the Deer-park  —  to the place of His death.’

The lama lowered his voice. ‘And I come here alone. For five  —  seven  —  eighteen  —  forty years it was in my mind that the Old Law was not well followed; being overlaid, as thou knowest, with devildom, charms, and idolatry. Even as the child outside said but now. Ay, even as the child said, with but-parasti.’

‘So it comes with all faiths.’

‘Thinkest thou? The books of my lamassery I read, and they were dried pith; and the later ritual with which we of the Reformed Law have cumbered ourselves  —  that, too, had no worth to these old eyes. Even the followers of the Excellent One are at feud on feud with one another. It is all illusion. Ay, maya, illusion. But I have another desire’  —  the seamed yellow face drew within three inches of the curator, and the long forefinger nail tapped on the table. ‘Your scholars, by these books, have followed the Blessed Feet in all their wanderings; but there are things which they have not sought out. I know nothing,  —  nothing do I know,  —  but I go to free myself from the Wheel of Things by a broad and open road.’ He smiled with most simple triumph. ‘As a pilgrim to the Holy Places I acquire merit. But there is more. Listen to a true thing. When our gracious Lord, being as yet a youth, sought a mate, men said, in His father’s court, that He was too tender for marriage. Thou knowest?’

The curator nodded, wondering what would come next.

‘So they made the triple trial of strength against all comers. And at the test of the Bow, our Lord first breaking that which they gave Him, called for such a bow as none might bend. Thou knowest?’

‘It is written. I have read.’

‘And, overshooting all other marks, the arrow passed far and far beyond sight. At the last it fell; and, where it touched earth, there broke out a stream which presently became a River, whose nature, by our Lord’s beneficence, and that merit He acquired ere He freed himself, is that whoso bathes in it washes away all taint and speckle of sin.’

‘So it is written,’ said the curator sadly.

The lama drew a long breath. ‘Where is that River? Fountain of Wisdom, where fell the arrow?’

‘Alas, my brother, I do not know,’ said the curator.

‘Nay, if it please thee to forget  —  the one thing only that thou hast not told me. Surely thou must know? See, I am an old man! I ask with my head between thy feet, O Fountain of Wisdom. We know He drew the bow! We know the arrow fell! We know the stream gushed! Where, then, is the River? My dream told me to find it. So I came. I am here. But where is the River?’

‘If I knew, think you I would not cry it aloud?’

‘By it one attains freedom from the Wheel of Things,’ the lama went on, unheeding. ‘The River of the Arrow! Think again! Some little stream, may be  —  dried in the heats? But the Holy One would never so cheat an old man.’

‘I do not know. I do not know.’

The lama brought his thousand-wrinkled face once more a handsbreadth from the Englishman’s. ‘I see thou dost not know. Not being of the Law, the matter is hid from thee.’

‘Ay  —  hidden  —  hidden.’

‘We are both bound, thou and I, my brother. But I’  —  he rose with a sweep of the soft thick drapery  —  ’I go to cut myself free. Come also!’

‘I am bound,’ said the curator. ‘But whither goest thou?’

‘First to Kashi (Benares): where else? There I shall meet one of the pure faith in a Jain temple of that city. He also is a Seeker in secret, and from him haply I may learn. May be he will go with me to Buddh Gaya. Thence north and west to Kapilavastu, and there will I seek for the River. Nay, I will seek everywhere as I go  —  for the place is not known where the arrow fell.’

‘And how wilt thou go? It is a far cry to Delhi, and farther to Benares.’

‘By road and the trains. From Pathankot, having left the Hills, I came hither in a te-rain. It goes swiftly. At first I was amazed to see those tall poles by the side of the road snatching up and snatching up their threads,’  —  he illustrated the stoop and whirl of a telegraph-pole flashing past the train. ‘But later, I was cramped and desired to walk, as I am used.’

‘And thou art sure of thy road?’ said the curator.

‘Oh, for that one but asks a question and pays money, and the appointed persons despatch all to the appointed place. That much I knew in my lamassery from sure report,’ said the lama proudly.

‘And when dost thou go?’ The curator smiled at the mixture of old-world piety and modern progress that is the note of India to-day.

‘As soon as may be. I follow the places of His life till I come to the River of the Arrow. There is, moreover, a written paper of the hours of the trains that go south.’

‘And for food?’ Lamas, as a rule, have good store of money somewhere about them, but the curator wished to make sure.

‘For the journey, I take up the Master’s begging-bowl. Yes. Even as He went so go I, forsaking the ease of my monastery. There was with me when I left the hills a chela (disciple) who begged for me as the Rule demands, but halting in Kulu awhile a fever took him and he died. I have now no chela, but I will take the alms-bowl and thus enable the charitable to acquire merit.’ He nodded his head valiantly.

Learned doctors of a lamassery do not beg, but the lama was an enthusiast in this quest.

‘Be it so,’ said the curator, smiling. ‘Suffer me now to acquire merit. We be craftsmen together, thou and I. Here is a new book of white English paper: here be sharpened pencils two and three  —  thick and thin, all good for a scribe. Now lend me thy spectacles.’