ish to see the
other things. Did he kill them?"

"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 queens' pavilion
that stood on the terrace, slipped over the rubbish, and dived down
the half-choked staircase that went underground from the centre 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 the 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."