The Kipling Reader: Selections from the Books of Rudyard KiplingKipling, Rudyard
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The Kipling Reader: Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling
Kipling, Rudyard
Animals -- Fiction; English poetry; India -- Social life and customs -- Literary collections; Readers; Short stories, English
Half an hour later the troops had gone away with the Mullah and his
thirteen friends. The dazed villagers were looking ruefully at a pile
of broken muskets and snapped swords, and wondering how in the world
they had come so to miscalculate the forbearance of the Indian
Government.
It was a very neat little affair, neatly carried out, and the men
concerned were unofficially thanked for their services.
Yet it seems to me that much credit is also due to another regiment
whose name did not appear in the brigade orders, and whose very
existence is in danger of being forgotten.
NAMGAY DOOLA.
There came to the beach a poor exile of Erin,
The dew on his wet robe hung heavy and chill;
Ere the steamer that brought him had passed out of hearin',
He was Alderman Mike inthrojuicing' a bill!
_American Song_.
Once upon a time there was a King who lived on the road to Thibet,
very many miles in the Himalayas. His Kingdom was eleven thousand
feet above the sea and exactly four miles square; but most of the
miles stood on end owing to the nature of the country. His revenues
were rather less than four hundred pounds yearly, and they were
expended in the maintenance of one elephant and a standing army of
five men. He was tributary to the Indian Government, who allowed him
certain sums for keeping a section of the Himalaya-Thibet road in
repair. He further increased his revenues by selling timber to the
Railway companies; for he would cut the great deodar trees in his one
forest, and they fell thundering into the Sutlej river and were swept
down to the plains three hundred miles away and became railway-ties.
Now and again this King, whose name does not matter, would mount a
ringstraked horse and ride scores of miles to Simla-town to confer
with the Lieutenant-Governor on matters of state, or to assure the
Viceroy that his sword was at the service of the Queen-Empress. Then
the Viceroy would cause a ruffle of drums to be sounded, and the
ringstraked horse and the cavalry of the State--two men in
tatters--and the herald who bore the silver stick before the King,
would trot back to their own place, which lay between the tail of a
heaven-climbing glacier and a dark birch-forest.
Now, from such a King, always remembering that he possessed one
veritable elephant, and could count his descent for twelve hundred
years, I expected, when it was my fate to wander through his
dominions, no more than mere license to live.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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