Kim - Chapter One - 19

by Rudyard Kipling



The first minutes of the movie; the first pages of the book.

---

'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, maybe--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?'

---

Continued next week. Tomorrow's installment from The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain.

More About This Book

Kipling's novel of India and the British empire, published in 1900.

More information here:

Literature Daily

More of this Series