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Who hath desired the Sea--the immense and contemptuous surges?
The shudder, the stumble, the swerve ere the star-stabbing bowsprit
merges--
The orderly clouds of the Trades and the ridged roaring
sapphire thereunder--
Unheralded cliff-lurking flaws and the head-sails' low-volleying
thunder?
His Sea in no wonder the same--his Sea and the same in each wonder--
His Sea that his being fulfils?
So and no otherwise--so and no otherwise hill-men desire their hills!

The Sea and the Hills.

'Who goes to the hills goes to his mother.'

They had crossed the Siwaliks and the half-tropical Doon, left
Mussoorie behind them, and headed north along the narrow hill-roads.
Day after day they struck deeper into the huddled mountains, and day
after day Kim watched the lama return to a man's strength. Among the
terraces of the Doon he had leaned on the boy's shoulder, ready to
profit by wayside halts. Under the great ramp to Mussoorie he drew
himself together as an old hunter faces a well-remembered bank, and
where he should have sunk exhausted swung his long draperies about him,
drew a deep double-lungful of the diamond air, and walked as only a
hillman can. Kim, plains-bred and plains-fed, sweated and panted
astonished. 'This is my country,' said the lama. 'Beside Such-zen,
this is flatter than a rice-field'; and with steady, driving strokes
from the loins he strode upwards. But it was on the steep downhill
marches, three thousand feet in three hours, that he went utterly away
from Kim, whose back ached with holding back, and whose big toe was
nigh cut off by his grass sandal-string. Through the speckled shadow
of the great deodar-forests; through oak feathered and plumed with
ferns; birch, ilex, rhododendron, and pine, out on to the bare
hillsides' slippery sunburnt grass, and back into the woodlands' coolth
again, till oak gave way to bamboo and palm of the valley, the lama
swung untiring.

Glancing back in the twilight at the huge ridges behind him and the
faint, thin line of the road whereby they had come, he would lay out,
with a hillman's generous breadth of vision, fresh marches for the
morrow; or, halting in the neck of some uplifted pass that gave on
Spiti and Kulu, would stretch out his hands yearningly towards the high
snows of the horizon. In the dawns they flared windy-red above stark
blue, as Kedarnath and Badrinath--kings of that wilderness--took the
first sun