Publisher's Synopsis
He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam Zammah on her brick platformopposite the old Ajaib-Gher-the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum. Who holdZam-Zammah, that 'fire-breathing dragon', hold the Punjab, for the great green-bronze piece isalways first of the conqueror's loot.There was some justification for Kim-he had kicked Lala Dinanath's boy off the trunnions-since the English held the Punjab and Kim was English. Though he was burned black as any native;though he spoke the vernacular by preference, and his mother-tongue in a clipped uncertain singsong; though he consorted on terms of perfect equality with the small boys of the bazar; Kim waswhite-a poor white of the very poorest. The half-caste woman who looked after him (she smokedopium, and pretended to keep a second-hand furniture shop by the square where the cheap cabswait) told the missionaries that she was Kim's mother's sister; but his mother had been nursemaid ina Colonel's family and had married Kimball O'Hara, a young colour-sergeant of the Mavericks, anIrish regiment. He afterwards took a post on the Sind, Punjab, and Delhi Railway, and his Regimentwent home without him. The wife died of cholera in Ferozepore, and O'Hara fell to drink andloafing up and down the line with the keen-eyed three-year-old baby. Societies and chaplains, anxious for the child, tried to catch him, but O'Hara drifted away, till he came across the womanwho took opium and learned the taste from her, and died as poor whites die in India. His estate atdeath consisted of three papers-one he called his 'ne varietur' because those words were writtenbelow his signature thereon, and another his 'clearance-certificate'. The third was Kim's birthcertificate. Those things, he was used to say, in his glorious opium-hours, would yet make littleKimball a man. On no account was Kim to part with them, for they belonged to a great piece ofmagic-such magic as men practised over yonder behind the Museum, in the big blue-and-whiteJadoo-Gher-the Magic House, as we name the Masonic Lodge. It would, he said, all come rightsome day, and Kim's horn would be exalted between pillars-monstrous pillars-of beauty andstrength. The Colonel himself, riding on a horse, at the head of the finest Regiment in the world, would attend to Kim-little Kim that should have been better off than his father. Nine hundredfirst-class devils, whose God was a Red Bull on a green field, would attend to Kim, if they had notforgotten O'Hara-poor O'Hara that was gang-foreman on the Ferozepore lin
