"They are all dead things. He says he is the keeper of them all." "Ah! As a wolf stands above meat he has taken to his own lair. Let us go." Mowgli swam to bank, rolled on the grass to dry himself, and the two set off for Cold Lairs, the deserted city of which you may have heard. Mowgli was not the least afraid of the Monkey People in those days, but the Monkey People had the liveliest horror of Mowgli. Their tribes, however, were raiding in the Jungle, and so Cold Lairs stood empty and silent in the moonlight. Kaa led up to the ruins of the queen's pavilion that stood on the terrace, slipped over the rubbish, and dived down the half-choked staircase that went underground from the center of the pavilion. Mowgli gave the snake-call--"We be of one blood, ye and I,"--and followed on his hands and knees. They crawled a long distance down a sloping passage that turned and twisted several times, and at last came to where the root of some great tree, growing thirty feet overhead, had forced out a solid stone in the wall. They crept through the gap, and found themselves in a large vault, whose domed roof had been also broken away by tree-roots so that a few streaks of light dropped down into the darkness. "A safe lair," said Mowgli, rising to his firm feet, "but over far to visit daily. And now what do we see?" "Am I nothing?" said a voice in the middle of the vault; and Mowgli saw something white move till, little by little, there stood up the hugest cobra he had ever set eyes on--a creature nearly eight feet long, and bleached by being in darkness to an old ivory-white. Even the spectacle-marks of his spread hood had faded to faint yellow. His eyes were as red as rubies, and altogether he was most wonderful. "Good hunting!" said Mowgli, who carried his manners with his knife, and that never left him. "What of my city?" said the White Cobra, without answering the greeting. "What of the great, the walled city--the city of a hundred elephants and twenty thousand horses, and cattle past counting--the city of the King of Twenty Kings? I grow deaf here, and it is long since I heard their war-gongs." "The Jungle is above our heads," said Mowgli. "I know only Hathi and his sons among elephants. Bagheera has slain all the horses in one village, and--what is a King?" "I told thee," said Kaa softly to the Cobra--"I told thee, four moons ago, that thy city was not." "The city--the great city of the forest whose gates are guarded by the King's towers--can never pass. They builded it before my father's father came from the egg, and it shall endure when my son's sons are as white as I! Salomdhi, son of Chandrabija, son of Viyeja, son of Yegasuri, made it in the days of Bappa Rawal. Whose cattle are _ye_?" "It is a lost trail," said Mowgli, turning to Kaa. "I know not his talk." "Nor I. He is very old. Father of Cobras, there is only the Jungle here, as it has been since the beginning."