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 sunlight . All day long they lay like molten silver under the sun , and at evening put on their jewels again . At first they breathed temperately upon the travellers , winds good to meet when one crawled over some gigantic hog 's - back ; but in a few days , at a height of nine or ten thousand feet , those breezes bit ; and Kim kindly allowed a village of hillmen to acquire merit by giving him a rough blanket-coat . The lama was mildly surprised that anyone should object to the knife-edged breezes which had cut the years off his shoulders . ` These are but the lower hills , chela . There is no cold till we come to the true Hills . ' ` Air and water are good , and the people are devout enough , but the food is very bad , ' Kim growled ; ` and we walk as though we were mad -- or English . It freezes at night , too . ' ' A little , maybe ; but only enough to make old bones rejoice in the sun . We must not always delight in soft beds and rich food . ' ` We might at least keep to the road . ' Kim had all a plainsman 's affection for the well-trodden track , not six feet wide , that snaked among the mountains ; but the lama , being Tibetan , could not refrain from short cuts over spurs and the rims of gravel-strewn slopes . As he explained to his limping disciple , a man bred among mountains can prophesy the course of a mountain-road , and though low-lying clouds might be a hindrance to a short-cutting stranger , they made no earthly difference to a thoughtful man . Thus , after long hours of what would be reckoned very fair mountaineering in civilized countries , they would pant over a saddle-back , sidle past a few landslips , and drop through forest at an angle of forty-five onto the road again .
Along their track XXXXX the villages of the hillfolk -- mud and earth huts , timbers now and then rudely carved with an axe -- clinging like swallows ' nests against the steeps , huddled on tiny flats half-way down a three-thousand-foot glissade ; jammed into a corner between cliffs that funnelled and focused every wandering blast ; or , for the sake of summer pasture , cowering down on a neck that in winter would be ten feet deep in snow .
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