stepped slowly, calling one to the other and stopping to haggle
with sweetmeat-sellers, or to make a prayer before one of the
wayside shrines - sometimes Hindu, sometimes Mussalman - which the
low-caste of both creeds share with beautiful impartiality. A solid
line of blue, rising and falling like the back of a caterpillar in
haste, would swing up through the quivering dust and trot past to a
chorus of quick cackling. That was a gang of changars - the women
who have taken all the embankments of all the Northern railways
under their charge - a flat-footed, big-bosomed, strong-limbed,
blue-petticoated clan of earth-carriers, hurrying north on news of
a job, and wasting no time by the road. They belong to the caste
whose men do not count, and they walked with squared elbows,
swinging hips, and heads on high, as suits women who carry heavy
weights. A little later a marriage procession would strike into the
Grand Trunk with music and shoutings, and a smell of marigold and
jasmine stronger even than the reek of the dust. One could see the
bride's litter, a blur of red and tinsel, staggering through the
haze, while the bridegroom's bewreathed pony turned aside to snatch
a mouthful from a passing fodder-cart. Then Kim would join the
Kentish-fire of good wishes and bad jokes, wishing the couple a
hundred sons and no daughters, as the saying is. Still more
interesting and more to be shouted over it was when a strolling
juggler with some half-trained monkeys, or a panting, feeble bear,
or a woman who tied goats' horns to her feet, and with these danced
on a slack-rope, set the horses to shying and the women to shrill,
long-drawn quavers of amazement.

The lama never raised his eyes. He did not note the money-lender on
his goose-rumped pony, hastening along to collect the cruel
interest; or the long-shouting, deep-voiced little mob -still in