Book: The Second Jungle Book

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"Oh, the eddy that set under the walls of the fort at
Allahabad!" said the Adjutant. "They came in there like
widgeon to the reeds, and round and round they swung--thus!"

He went off into his horrible dance again, while the Jackal
looked on enviously. He naturally could not remember the
terrible year of the Mutiny they were talking about.
The Mugger continued:

"Yes, by Allahabad one lay still in the slack-water and let
twenty go by to pick one; and, above all, the English were not
cumbered with jewellery and nose-rings and anklets as my women
are nowadays. To delight in ornaments is to end with a rope for
a necklace, as the saying is. All the muggers of all the rivers
grew fat then, but it was my Fate to be fatter than them all.
The news was that the English were being hunted into the
rivers, and by the Right and Left of Gunga! we believed it
was true. So far as I went south I believed it to he true;
and I went down-stream beyond Monghyr and the tombs that look
over the river."

"I know that place," said the Adjutant. "Since those days
Monghyr is a lost city. Very few live there now."

"Thereafter I worked up-stream very slowly and lazily, and a
little above Monghyr there came down a boatful of white-faces--
alive! They were, as I remember, women, lying under a cloth
spread over sticks, and crying aloud. There was never a gun
fired at us, the watchers of the fords in those days. All the
guns were busy elsewhere. We could hear them day and night
inland, coming and going as the wind shifted. I rose up full
before the boat, because I had never seen white-faces alive,
though I knew them well--otherwise. A naked white child kneeled
by the side of the boat, and, stooping over, must needs try to
trail his hands in the river. It is a pretty thing to see how a
child loves running water. I had fed that day, but there was yet
a little unfilled space within me. Still, it was for sport and
not for food that I rose at the child"s hands. They were so
clear a mark that I did not even look when I closed; but they
were so small that though my jaws rang true--I am sure of that--
the child drew them up swiftly, unhurt. They must have passed
between tooth and tooth--those small white hands. I should have
caught him cross-wise at the elbows; but, as I said, it was only
for sport and desire to see new things that I rose at all.
They cried out one after another in the boat, and presently
I rose again to watch them. The boat was too heavy to push over.
They were only women, but he who trusts a woman will walk on
duckweed in a pool, as the saying is: and by the Right and Left
of Gunga, that is truth!"

"Once a woman gave me some dried skin from a fish," said
the Jackal. "I had hoped to get her baby, but horse-food is
better than the kick of a horse, as the saying is. What did
thy woman do?"

"She fired at me with a short gun of a kind I have never seen
before or since. Five times, one after another" (the Mugger must
have met with an old-fashioned revolver); "and I stayed open-
mouthed and gaping, my head in the smoke. Never did I see such
a thing. Five times, as swiftly as I wave my tail--thus!"

The Jackal, who had been growing more and more interested in
the story, had just time to leap back as the huge tail swung by
like a scythe.

"Not before the fifth shot," said the Mugger, as though he had
never dreamed of stunning one of his listeners--" not before the
fifth shot did I sink, and I rose in time to hear a boatman
telling all those white women that I was most certainly dead.
One bullet had gone under a neck-plate of mine. I know not if it
is there still, for the reason I cannot turn my head. Look and
see, child. It will show that my tale is true."

"I?" said the Jackal. "Shall an eater of old shoes, a bone-
cracker, presume, to doubt the word of the Envy of the River?
May my tail be bitten off by blind puppies if the shadow of such
a thought has crossed my humble mind! The Protector of the Poor
has condescended to inform me, his slave, that once in his life
he has been wounded by a woman. That is sufficient, and I will
tell the tale to all my children, asking for no proof."

"Over-much civility is sometimes no better than over-much
discourtesy, for, as the saying is, one can choke a guest with
curds. I do NOT desire that any children of thine should know
that the Mugger of Mugger-Ghaut took his only wound from a
woman. They will have much else to think of if they get their
meat as miserably as does their father."

"It is forgotten long ago! It was never said! There never
was a white woman! There was no boat! Nothing whatever happened
at all."

The Jackal waved his brush to show how completely everything was
wiped out of his memory, and sat down with an air.

"Indeed, very many things happened," said the Mugger, beaten in
his second attempt that night to get the better of his friend.
(Neither bore malice, however. Eat and be eaten was fair law
along the river, and the Jackal came in for his share of plunder
when the Mugger had finished a meal.) "I left that boat and went
up-stream, and, when I had reached Arrah and the back-waters
behind it, there were no more dead English. The river was empty
for a while. Then came one or two dead, in red coats, not
English, but of one kind all--Hindus and Purbeeahs--then five
and six abreast, and at last, from Arrah to the North beyond
Agra, it was as though whole villages had walked into the water.
They came out of little creeks one after another, as the logs
come down in the Rains. When the river rose they rose also in
companies from the shoals they had rested upon; and the falling
flood dragged them with it across the fields and through the
Jungle by the long hair. All night, too, going North, I heard
the guns, and by day the shod feet of men crossing fords, and
that noise which a heavy cart-wheel makes on sand under water;
and every ripple brought more dead. At last even I was afraid,
for I said: "If this thing happen to men, how shall the Mugger
of Mugger-Ghaut escape?" There were boats, too, that came up
behind me without sails, burning continually, as the cotton-
boats sometimes burn, but never sinking."

"Ah!" said the Adjutant. "Boats like those come to Calcutta of
the South. They are tall and black, they beat up the water
behind them with a tail, and they----"

"Are thrice as big as my village. MY boats were low and white;
they beat up the water on either side of them" and were no
larger than the boats of one who speaks truth should be.
They made me very afraid, and I left water and went back to this
my river, hiding by day and walking by night, when I could not
find little streams to help me. I came to my village again, but
I did not hope to see any of my people there. Yet they were
ploughing and sowing and reaping, and going to and fro in their
fields, as quietly as their own cattle."

"Was there still good food in the river?" said the Jackal.

"More than I had any desire for. Even I--and I do not eat mud--
even I was tired, and, as I remember, a little frightened of
this constant coming down of the silent ones. I heard my people
say in my village that all the English were dead; but those that
came, face down, with the current were NOT English, as my people
saw. Then my people said that it was best to say nothing at all,
but to pay the tax and plough the land. After a long time the
river cleared, and those that came down it had been clearly
drowned by the floods, as I could well see; and though it was
not so easy then to get food, I was heartily glad of it.
A little killing here and there is no bad thing--but even the
Mugger is sometimes satisfied, as the saying is."

"Marvellous! Most truly marvellous!" said the Jackal. "I am
become fat through merely hearing about so much good eating.
And afterward what, if it be permitted to ask, did the Protector
of the Poor do?"

"I said to myself--and by the Right and Left of Gunga! I locked
my jaws on that vow--I said I would never go roving any more.
So I lived by the Ghaut, very close to my own people, and I
watched over them year after year; and they loved me so much
that they threw marigold wreaths at my head whenever they saw it
lift. Yes, and my Fate has been very kind to me, and the river
is good enough to respect my poor and infirm presence; only----"

"No one is all happy from his beak to his tail," said the
Adjutant sympathetically. "What does the Mugger of Mugger-Ghaut
need more?"

"That little white child which I did not get," said the Mugger,
with a deep sigh. "He was very small, but I have not forgotten.
I am old now, but before I die it is my desire to try one new
thing. It is true they are a heavy-footed, noisy, and foolish
people, and the sport would be small, but I remember the old
days above Benares, and, if the child lives, he will remember
still. It may be he goes up and down the bank of some river,
telling how he once passed his hands between the teeth of the
Mugger of Mugger-Ghaut, and lived to make a tale of it. My Fate
has been very kind, but that plagues me sometimes in my dreams--
the thought of the little white child in the bows of that boat."
He yawned, and closed his jaws. "And now I will rest and think.
Keep silent, my children, and respect the aged."

He turned stiffly, and shuffled to the top of the sand-bar,
while the Jackal drew back with the Adjutant to the shelter of
a tree stranded on the end nearest the railway bridge.

"That was a pleasant and profitable life," he grinned, looking
up inquiringly at the bird who towered above him. "And not once,
mark you, did he think fit to tell me where a morsel might have
been left along the banks. Yet I have told HIM a hundred times
of good things wallowing down-stream. How true is the saying,
"All the world forgets the Jackal and the Barber when the news
has been told!" Now he is going to sleep! Arrh!"

"How can a jackal hunt with a Mugger?" said the Adjutant
coolly. "Big thief and little thief; it is easy to say who
gets the pickings."

The Jackal turned, whining impatiently, and was going to curl
himself up under the tree-trunk, when suddenly he cowered, and
looked up through the draggled branches at the bridge almost
above his head.

"What now?" said the Adjutant, opening his wings uneasily.

"Wait till we see. The wind blows from us to them, but they are
not looking for us--those two men."

"Men, is it? My office protects me. All India knows I am holy."
The Adjutant, being a first-class scavenger, is allowed to go
where he pleases, and so this one never flinched.

"I am not worth a blow from anything better than an old shoe,"
said the Jackal, and listened again. "Hark to that footfall!"
he went on. "That was no country leather, but the shod foot of
a white-face. Listen again! Iron hits iron up there! It is a
gun! Friend, those heavy-footed, foolish English are coming to
speak with the Mugger."

"Warn him, then. He was called Protector of the Poor by some one
not unlike a starving Jackal but a little time ago."

"Let my cousin protect his own hide. He has told me again and
again there is nothing to fear from the white-faces. They must
be white-faces. Not a villager of Mugger-Ghaut would dare to
come after him. See, I said it was a gun! Now, with good luck,
we shall feed before daylight. He cannot hear well out of water,
and--this time it is not a woman!"

A shiny barrel glittered for a minute in the moonlight on the
girders. The Mugger was lying on the sand-bar as still as his
own shadow, his fore-feet spread out a little, his head dropped
between them, snoring like a--mugger.

A voice on the bridge whispered: "It's an odd shot--straight
down almost--but as safe as houses. Better try behind the neck.
Golly! what a brute! The villagers will be wild if he's shot,
though. He's the deota [godling] of these parts."

"Don't care a rap," another voice answered; he took about
fifteen of my best coolies while the bridge was building,
and it's time he was put a stop to. I've been after him in
a boat for weeks. Stand by with the Martini as soon as I've
given him both barrels of this."

"Mind the kick, then. A double four-bore's no joke."

"That's for him to decide. Here goes!"

There was a roar like the sound of a small cannon (the biggest
sort of elephant-rifle is not very different from some
artillery), and a double streak of flame, followed by the
stinging crack of a Martini, whose long bullet makes nothing of
a crocodile's plates. But the explosive bullets did the work.
One of them struck just behind the Mugger's neck, a hand's-
breadth to the left of thle backbone, while the other burst
a little lower down, at the beginning of the tail. In ninety-
nine cases out of a hundred a mortally-wounded crocodile can
scramble to deep water and get away; but the Mugger of Mugger-
Ghaut was literally broken into three pieces. He hardly moved
his head before the life went out of him, and he lay as flat
as the Jackal.

"Thunder and lightning! Lightning and thunder!" said that
miserable little beast. "Has the thing that pulls the covered
carts over the bridge tumbled at last?"

"It is no more than a gun," said the Adjutant, though his
very tail-feathers quivered. "Nothing more than a gun. He is
certainly dead. Here come the white-faces."

The two Englishmen had hurried down from the bridge and across
to the sand-bar, where they stood admiring the length of the
Mugger. Then a native with an axe cut off the big head, and four
men dragged it across the spit.

"The last time that I had my hand in a Mugger's mouth," said one
of the Englishmen, stooping down (he was the man who had built
the bridge), "it was when I was about five years old--coming
down the river by boat to Monghyr. I was a Mutiny baby, as they
call it. Poor mother was in the boat, too, and she often told me
how she fired dad's old pistol at the beast's head."

"Well, you've certainly had your revenge on the chief of the
clan--even if the gun has made your nose bleed. Hi, you boatmen!
Haul that head up the bank, and we'll boil it for the skull.
The skin's too knocked about to keep. Come along to bed now.
This was worth sitting up all night for, wasn't it?"

.....

Curiously enough, the Jackal and the Adjutant made the very same
remark not three minutes after the men had left.


A RIPPLE SONG

Once a ripple came to land
In the golden sunset burning--
Lapped against a maiden's hand,
By the ford returning.

Dainty foot and gentle breast--
Here, across, be glad and rest.
"Maiden, wait," the ripple saith.
"Wait awhile, for I am Death!"

"Where my lover calls I go--
Shame it were to treat him coldly--
'Twas a fish that circled so,
Turning over boldly."

Dainty foot and tender heart,
Wait the loaded ferry-cart.
"Wait, ah, wait!" the ripple saith;
"Maiden, wait, for I am Death!"

"When my lover calls I haste-
Dame Disdain was never wedded!"
Ripple-ripple round her waist,
Clear the current eddied.

Foolish heart and faithful hand,
Little feet that touched no land.
Far away the ripple sped,
Ripple--ripple--running red!



THE KING'S ANKUS

These are the Four that are never content, that have never
been filled since the Dews began--
Jacala's mouth, and the glut of the Kite, and the hands of the
Ape, and the Eyes of Man.
Jungle Saying.

Kaa, the big Rock Python, had changed his skin for perhaps the
two-hundredth time since his birth; and Mowgli, who never forgot
that he owed his life to Kaa for a night's work at Cold Lairs,
which you may perhaps remember, went to congratulate him.
Skin-changing always makes a snake moody and depressed till the
new skin begins to shine and look beautiful. Kaa never made fun
of Mowgli any more, but accepted him, as the other Jungle People
did, for the Master of the Jungle, and brought him all the news
that a python of his size would naturally hear. What Kaa did not
know about the Middle Jungle, as they call it,--the life that
runs close to the earth or under it, the boulder, burrow, and
the tree-bole life,--might have been written upon the smallest
of his scales.

That afternoon Mowgli was sitting in the circle of Kaa!s great
coils, fingering the flaked and broken old skin that lay all
looped and twisted among the rocks just as Kaa had left it.
Kaa had very courteously packed himself under Mowgli's broad,
bare shoulders, so that the boy was really resting in a
living arm-chair.

"Even to the scales of the eyes it is perfect," said Mowgli,
under his breath, playing with the old skin. "Strange to see the
covering of one's own head at one's own feet!"

"Ay, but I lack feet," said Kaa; "and since this is the custom
of all my people, I do not find it strange. Does thy skin never
feel old and harsh?"

"Then go I and wash, Flathead; but, it is true, in the great
heats I have wished I could slough my skin without pain, and
run skinless."

"I wash, and ALSO I take off my skin. How looks the new coat?"

Mowgli ran his hand down the diagonal checkerings of the immense
back. "The Turtle is harder-backed, but not so gay," he said
judgmatically. "The Frog, my name-bearer, is more gay, but not
so hard. It is very beautiful to see--like the mottling in the
mouth of a lily."

"It needs water. A new skin never comes to full colour before
the first bath. Let us go bathe."

"I will carry thee," said Mowgli; and he stooped down, laughing,
to lift the middle section of Kaa's great body, just where the
barrel was thickest. A man might just, as well have tried to
heave up a two-foot water-main; and Kaa lay still, puffing with
quiet amusement. Then the regular evening game began--the Boy in
the flush of his great strength, and the Python in his sumptuous
new skin, standing up one against the other for a wrestling
match--a trial of eye and strength. Of course, Kaa could have
crushed a dozen Mowglis if he had let himself go; but he played
carefully, and never loosed one-tenth of his power. Ever since
Mowgli was strong enough to endure a little rough handling,
Kaa had taught him this game, and it suppled his limbs as
nothing else could. Sometimes Mowgli would stand lapped almost
to his throat in Kaa's shifting coils, striving to get one arm
free and catch him by the throat. Then Kaa would give way
limply, and Mowgli, with both quick-moving feet, would try to
cramp the purchase of that huge tail as it flung backward
feeling for a rock or a stump. They would rock to and fro,
head to head, each waiting for his chance, till the beautiful,
statue-like group melted in a whirl of black-and-yellow coils
and struggling legs and arms, to rise up again and again.
"Now! now! now!" said Kaa, making feints with his head that
even Mowgli's quick hand could not turn aside. "Look! I touch
thee here, Little Brother! Here, and here! Are thy hands numb?
Here again!"

The game always ended in one way--with a straight, driving blow
of the head that knocked the boy over and over. Mowgli could
never learn the guard for that lightning lunge, and, as Kaa
said, there was not the least use in trying.

"Good hunting!" Kaa grunted at last; and Mowgli, as usual, was
shot away half a dozen yards, gasping and laughing. He rose with
his fingers full of grass, and followed Kaa to the wise snake's
pet bathing-place--a deep, pitchy-black pool surrounded with
rocks, and made interesting by sunken tree-stumps. The boy
slipped in, Jungle-fashion, without a sound, and dived across;
rose, too, without a sound, and turned on his back, his arms
behind his head, watching the moon rising above the rocks,
and breaking up her reflection in the water with his toes.
Kaa's diamond-shaped head cut the pool like a razor, and came
out to rest on Mowgli's shoulder. They lay still, soaking
luxuriously in the cool water.

"It is VERY good," said Mowgli at last, sleepily. Now, in the
Man-Pack, at this hour, as I remember, they laid them down upon
hard pieces of wood in the inside of a mud-trap, and, having
carefully shut out all the clean winds, drew foul cloth over
their heavy heads and made evil songs through their noses.
It is better in the Jungle."

A hurrying cobra slipped down over a rock and drank, gave them
"Good hunting!" and went away.

"Sssh!" said Kaa, as though he had suddenly remembered
something. "So the Jungle gives thee all that thou hast ever
desired, Little Brother?"

"Not all," said Mowgli, laughing; "else there would be a new and
strong Shere Khan to kill once a moon. Now, I could kill with my
own hands, asking no help of buffaloes. And also I have wished
the sun to shine in the middle of the Rains, and the Rains to
cover the sun in the deep of summer; and also I have never gone
empty but I wished that I had killed a goat; and also I have
never killed a goat but I wished it had been buck; nor buck but
I wished it had been nilghai. But thus do we feel, all of us."

"Thou hast no other desire?" the big snake demanded.

"What more can I wish? I have the Jungle, and the favour of the
Jungle! Is there more anywhere between sunrise and sunset?"

"Now, the Cobra said----" Kaa began. What cobra? He that went
away just now said nothing. He was hunting."

"It was another."

"Hast thou many dealings with the Poison People? I give them
their own path. They carry death in the fore-tooth, and that
is not good--for they are so small. But what hood is this thou
hast spoken with?"

Kaa rolled slowly in the water like a steamer in a beam sea.
"Three or four moons since," said he, "I hunted in Cold Lairs,
which place thou hast not forgotten. And the thing I hunted fled
shrieking past the tanks and to that house whose side I once
broke for thy sake, and ran into the ground."

"But the people of Cold Lairs do not live in burrows." Mowgli
knew that Kaa was telling of the Monkey People.

"This thing was not living, but seeking to live," Kaa replied,
with a quiver of his tongue. "He ran into a burrow that led
very far. I followed, and having killed, I slept. When I
waked I went forward."

"Under the earth?"

"Even so, coming at last upon a White Hood [a white cobra],
who spoke of things beyond my knowledge, and showed me many
things I had never before seen."

"New game? Was it good hunting?" Mowgli turned quickly on
his side.

"It was no game, and would have broken all my teeth; but the
White Hood said that a man--he spoke as one that knew the
breed--that a man would give the breath under his ribs for only
the sight of those things."

"We will look," said Mowgli. "I now remember that I was
once a man."

"Slowly--slowly. It was haste killed the Yellow Snake that ate
the sun. We two spoke together under the earth, and I spoke of
thee, naming thee as a man. Said the White Hood (and he is
indeed as old as the Jungle): 'It is long since I have seen a
man. Let him come, and he shall see all these things, for the
least of which very many men would die.'"

"That MUST be new game. And yet the Poison People do not tell us
when game is afoot. They are an unfriendly folk."

"It is NOT game. It is--it is--I cannot say what it is."

"We will go there. I have never seen a White Hood, and I wish 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."

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