The lama snuffed the wind wistfully.

‘If we go North,’ — Kim put the question to the waking sunrise — ’would not much mid-day heat be avoided by walking among the lower hills at least? ...  Is the charm made, Holy One?’

’I have written the names of seven silly devils — not one of whom is worth a grain of dust in the eye.  Thus do foolish women drag us from the Way!’

Hurree Babu came out from behind the dovecote washing his teeth with ostentatious ritual.  Full-fleshed, heavy-haunched, bull-necked, and deep-voiced, he did not look like ‘a fearful man’.  Kim signed almost imperceptibly that matters were in good train, and when the morning toilet was over, Hurree Babu, in flowery speech, came to do honour to the lama.  They ate, of course, apart, and afterwards the old lady, more or less veiled behind a window, returned to the vital business of green-mango colics in the young.  The lama’s knowledge of medicine was, of course, sympathetic only.  He believed that the dung of a black horse, mixed with sulphur, and carried in a snake-skin, was a sound remedy for cholera; but the symbolism interested him far more than the science.  Hurree Babu deferred to these views with enchanting politeness, so that the lama called him a courteous physician.  Hurree Babu replied that he was no more than an inexpert dabbler in the mysteries; but at least — he thanked the Gods therefore — he knew when he sat in the presence of a master.  He himself had been taught by the Sahibs, who do not consider expense, in the lordly halls of Calcutta; but, as he was ever first to acknowledge, there lay a wisdom behind earthly wisdom — the high and lonely lore of meditation.  Kim looked on with envy.  The Hurree Babu of his knowledge — oily, effusive, and nervous — was gone; gone, too, was the brazen drug-vendor of overnight.  There remained — polished, polite, attentive — a sober, learned son of experience and adversity, gathering wisdom from the lama’s lips.  The old lady confided to Kim that these rare levels were beyond her.  She liked charms with plenty of ink that one could wash off in water, swallow, and be done with.  Else what was the use of the Gods?  She liked men and women, and she spoke of them — of kinglets she had known in the past; of her own youth and beauty; of the depredations of leopards and the eccentricities of love Asiatic; of the incidence of taxation, rack-renting, funeral ceremonies, her son-in-law (this by allusion, easy to be followed), the care of the young, and the age’s lack of decency.  And Kim, as interested in the life of this world as she soon to leave it, squatted with his feet under the hem of his robe, drinking all in, while the lama demolished one after another every theory of body-curing put forward by Hurree Babu.

At noon the Babu strapped up his brass-bound drug-box, took his patent-leather shoes of ceremony in one hand, a gay blue-and-white umbrella in the other, and set off northwards to the Doon, where, he said, he was in demand among the lesser kings of those parts.