CHAPTER XIII
Who hath desired the Sea—the immense and contemptuous surges?
The shudder, the stumble, the swerve ere the star-stabbing bowsprit emerges—
The orderly clouds of the trade and the ridged roaring sapphire thereunder—
Unheralded cliff-lurking flaws and the head-sails low-volleying thunder?
His Sea in no wonder the same—his Sea and the same in each wonder.
His Sea that his being fulfils?
So and no otherwise—so and no otherwise hillmen desire their Hills!
'Who goes to the Hills goes to his mother.'
They had crossed the Sewaliks and the half-tropical Doon, left Mussoorie behind them, and headed north along the narrow hill-roads. Day after day they struck deeper into the huddled mountains, and day after day Kim watched the lama return to a man's strength. Among the terraces of the Doon he had leaned on the boy's shoulder, ready to profit by wayside halts. Under the great ramp to Mussoorie he drew himself together as an old hunter faces a well-remembered bank, and where he should have dropped exhausted swung his long draperies about him, drew a deep double lungful of the diamond air, and walked as only a hillman can. Kim, plains-bred and plains-fed, sweated and panted astonished. 'This is my country,' said the lama. 'Beside Suchzen, this is flatter than a rice-field;' and with steady, driving strokes from the loins he strode upwards. But it was on the steep downhill marches, three thousand feet in three hours, that he went utterly away from Kim, whose back ached with holding back, and whose big toe was nigh cut off by his grass sandal-string. Through the speckled
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