amp of Tibetans hurrying down tiny sheep,
each laden with a bag of borax. They came out upon grassy shoulders
still snow-speckled, and through forest, to grass anew. For all their
marchings, Kedarnath and Badrinath were not impressed; and it was only
after days of travel that Kim, uplifted upon some insignificant
ten-thousand-foot hummock, could see that a shoulder-knot or horn of
the two great lords had--ever so slightly--changed outline.

At last they entered a world within a world--a valley of leagues where
the high hills were fashioned of a mere rubble and refuse from off the
knees of the mountains. Here one day's march carried them no farther,
it seemed, than a dreamer's clogged pace bears him in a nightmare.
They skirted a shoulder painfully for hours, and, behold, it was but an
outlying boss in an outlying buttress of the main pile! A rounded
meadow revealed itself, when they had reached it, for a vast tableland
running far into the valley. Three days later, it was a dim fold in
the earth to southward.

'Surely the Gods live here!' said Kim, beaten down by the silence and
the appalling sweep and dispersal of the cloud-shadows after rain.
'This is no place for men!'

'Long and long ago,' said the lama, as to himself, 'it was asked of the
Lord whether the world were everlasting. On this the Excellent One
returned no answer ... When I was in Ceylon, a wise Seeker confirmed
that from the gospel which is written in Pali. Certainly, since we
know the way to Freedom, the question were unprofitable, but--look, and
know illusion, chela! These--are the true Hills! They are like my
hills by Suchzen. Never were such hills!'

Above them, still enormously above them, earth towered away towards the
snow-line, where from east to west across hundreds of miles, ruled as
with a ruler, the last of the bold birches stopped. Above that, in
scarps and blocks upheaved, the rocks strove to fight their heads above
the white smother. Above these again, changeless since the world's
beginning, but changing to every mood of sun and cloud, lay out the
eternal snow. They could see blots and blurs on its face where storm
and wandering wullie-wa got up to dance. Below them, as they stood,
the forest slid away in a sheet of blue-green for mile upon mile; below
the forest was a village in its sprinkle of terraced fields and steep
grazing-grounds. Below the village they knew, though a thunderstorm
worried and growled there for th