'I will take them and the pencils and the white note-book,' said
the lama, 'as a sign of friendship between priest and priest -
and now -' He fumbled at his belt, detached the open-work iron
pincers, and laid it on the Curator's table. 'That is for a
memory between thee and me - my pencase. It is something old -
even as I am.'

It was a piece of ancient design, Chinese, of an iron that is not
smelted these days; and the collector's heart in the Curator's
bosom had gone out to it from the first. For no persuasion would
the lama resume his gift.

'When I return, having found the River, I will bring thee a
written picture of the Padma Samthora such as I used to make on
silk at the lamassery. Yes - and of the Wheel of Life,' he
chuckled, 'for we be craftsmen together, thou and I.'

The Curator would have detained him: they are few in the world
who still have the secret of the conventional brush-pen Buddhist
pictures which are, as it were, half written and half drawn. But
the lama strode out, head high in air, and pausing an instant
before the great statue of a Bodhisat in meditation, brushed
through the turnstiles.

Kim followed like a shadow. What he had overheard excited him
wildly. This man was entirely new to all his experience, and he
meant to investigate further, precisely as he would have
investigated a new building or a strange festival in Lahore city.
The lama was his trove, and he purposed to take possession. Kim's
mother had been Irish, too.