o in the eddy
under the python's lashing sides. A mile or two above the Peace Rock
the Waingunga narrows between a gorge of marble rocks from eighty to
a hundred feet high, and the current runs like a mill-race between and
over all manner of ugly stones. But Mowgli did not trouble his head
about the water; little water in the world could have given him a
moment's fear. He was looking at the gorge on either side and sniffing
uneasily, for there was a sweetish-sourish smell in the air, very like
the smell of a big ant-hill on a hot day. Instinctively he lowered
himself in the water, only raising his head to breathe from time to
time, and Kaa came to anchor with a double twist of his tail round a
sunken rock, holding Mowgli in the hollow of a coil, while the water
raced on.

"This is the Place of Death," said the boy. "Why do we come here?"

"They sleep," said Kaa. "Hathi will not turn aside for the Striped One.
Yet Hathi and the Striped One together turn aside for the dhole, and the
dhole they say turn aside for nothing. And yet for whom do the Little
People of the Rocks turn aside? Tell me, Master of the Jungle, who is
the Master of the Jungle?"

"These," Mowgli whispered. "It is the Place of Death. Let us go."

"Nay, look well, for they are asleep. It is as it was when I was not the
length of thy arm."

The split and weatherworn rocks of the gorge of the Waingunga had been
used since the beginning of the Jungle by the Little People of the
Rocks--the busy, furious, black wild bees of India; and, as Mowgli knew
well, all trails turned off half a mile before they reached the gorge.
For centuries the Little People had hived and swarmed from cleft to
cleft, and swarmed again, staining the white marble with stale honey,
and made their combs tall and deep in the dark of the inner caves, where
neither man nor beast nor fire nor water had ever touched them. The
length of the gorge on both siaes was hung as it were with black
shimmery velvet curtains, and Mowgli sank as he looked, for those were
the clotted millions of the sleeping bees. There were other lumps and
festoons and things like decayed tree-trunks studded on the face of the
rock, the old combs of past years, or new cities built in the shadow of
the windless gorge, and huge masses of spongy, rotten trash had rolled
down and stuck among the trees and creepers that clung to the rock-face.
As he listened he heard more than once the rustle and slide of a
honey-loaded