Together they set off through the mysterious dusk, full of the noises
of a city below the hillside, and the breath of a cool wind in
deodar-crowned Jakko, shouldering the stars. The house-lights,
scattered on every level, made, as it were, a double firmament. Some
were fixed, others belonged to the 'rickshaws of the careless,
open-spoken English folk, going out to dinner.

'It is here,' said Kim's guide, and halted in a veranda flush with the
main road. No door stayed them, but a curtain of beaded reeds that
split up the lamplight beyond.

'He is come,' said the boy, in a voice little louder than a sigh, and
vanished. Kim felt sure that the boy had been posted to guide him from
the first, but, putting a bold face on it, parted the curtain. A
black-bearded man, with a green shade over his eyes, sat at a table,
and, one by one, with short, white hands, picked up globules of light
from a tray before him, threaded them on a glancing silken string, and
hummed to himself the while. Kim was conscious that beyond the circle
of light the room was full of things that smelt like all the temples of
all the East. A whiff of musk, a puff of sandal-wood, and a breath of
sickly jessamine-oil caught his opened nostrils.

'I am here,' said Kim at last, speaking in the vernacular: the smells
made him forget that he was to be a Sahib.

'Seventy-nine, eighty, eighty-one,' the man counted to himself,
stringing pearl after pearl so quickly that Kim could scarcely follow
his fingers. He slid off the green shade and looked fixedly at Kim for
a full half-minute. The pupils of the eye dilated and closed to
pin-pricks, as if at will. There was a fakir by the Taksali Gate who
had just this gift and made money by it, especially when cursing silly
women. Kim stared with interest. His disreputable friend could
further twitch his ears, almost like a goat, and Kim was disappointed
that this new man could not imitate him.

'Do not be afraid,' said Lurgan Sahib suddenly.

'Why should I fear?'

'Thou wilt sleep here tonight, and stay with me till it is time to go
again to Nucklao. It is an order.'

'It is an order,' Kim repeated. 'But where shall I sleep?'

'Here, in this room.' Lurgan Sahib waved his hand towards the darkness
behind him.

'So be it,' said Kim composedly. 'Now?'

He nodded and held the lamp above his head. As the light swept them,
there leaped out from the walls a collection of Tibetan devil-dance
masks,