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We returned two visits of ceremony, one to Meepo's house, a poor cottage, to which we carried presents of chintz dresses for his two little girls, who were busy teazing their hair with cylindrical combs, formed of a single slender joint of bamboo slit all round half-way up into innumerable teeth. Our other visit was paid to the Lama's family, who inhabited a large house not far from the Rajah's.
I buy myself my drug-box, and I am very good doctor really. I go to Akrola of the Ford, and hear all about you, and I talk here and talk there. All the common people know what you do. I knew when the hospitable old lady sent the dooli. They have great recollections of the old lama's visits here. I know old ladies cannot keep their hands from medicines. So I am a doctor, and you hear my talk?
There was a drowsy buzz of small life in hot sunshine, a cooing of doves, and a sleepy drone of well-wheels across the fields. Slowly and impressively the lama began. At the end of ten minutes the old soldier slid from his pony, to hear better as he said, and sat with the reins round his wrist. The lama's voice faltered, the periods lengthened. Kim was busy watching a grey squirrel.
This time it is a priest. Kim was in the road headlong, patting the dusty feet beneath the dirty yellow robe. 'I have waited here a day and a half, the lama's level voice began. 'Nay, I had a disciple with me. He that was my friend at the Temple of the Tirthankars gave me a guide for this journey. I came from Benares in the te-rain, when thy letter was given me. Yes, I am well fed.
Here is no ticket to buy. 'Am I thy chela, or am I not? Do I not safeguard thy old feet about the ways? Give me the money and at dawn I will return it. He slipped his hand above the lama's girdle and brought away the purse. 'Be it so be it so. The old man nodded his head. 'This is a great and terrible world. I never knew there were so many men alive in it.
He loitered for light cargoes at village edges, or picked up the price of his daily rice at odd tasks ashore, but always, were it day or night for travel, his tiny craft bore surely seaward. Mile after slow mile dropped behind him, like the praying beads of a lama's chain, but at last the river salted slightly, and his tiny craft was lifted by the slow swell of the sea's hand reaching for inland.
'He walk! He cannot cover half a mile. Whither would old bones go? At this Kim, already perplexed by the lama's collapse and foreseeing the weight of the bag, fairly lost his temper. 'What is it to thee, woman of ill-omen, where he goes? 'Nothing but something to thee, priest with a Sahib's face. Wilt thou carry him on thy shoulders? 'I go to the Plains. None must hinder my return.
Found the Q.M.G. to-day laid up with fever and influenza, and administered some quinine pills to him, besides ordering a steed to carry him on to Ladak to-morrow. Explored the Lama's habitations and temples, and saw some very curious carvings and paintings on stones, some of them not altogether in the Church order of design.
'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.
He had once been chased up and down Japan by the Mikado's agents for having in his possession some royal-silk tapestry which it is forbidden to take out of the country. Another time he had gone into Tibet for a lama's ghost mask studded with raw emeralds and turquoise, and had suffered untold miseries in getting down into India.
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