"Aye, but I lack feet," said Kaa; "and since this is the custom of all my people, I do not find it strange. Does thy skin never feel old and harsh?"
"Then go I and wash, Flathead; but, it is true, in the great heats I have wished I could slough my skin without pain, and run skinless."
"I wash, and _also_ I take off my skin. How looks the new coat?"
Mowgli ran his hand down the diagonal checkerings of the immense back. "The Turtle is harder-backed, but not so gay," he said judgmatically. "The Frog, my name-bearer, is more gay, but not so hard. It is very beautiful to see--like the mottling in the mouth of a lily."
"It needs water. A new skin never comes to full color before the first bath. Let us go bathe."
"I will carry thee," said Mowgli; and he stooped down, laughing, to lift the middle section of Kaa"s great body, just where the barrel was thickest. A man might just as well have tried to heave up a two-foot water-main; and Kaa lay still, puffing with quiet amus.e.m.e.nt. Then the regular evening game began--the boy in the flush of his great strength, and the Python in his sumptuous new skin, standing up one against the other for a wrestling-match--a trial of eye and strength.
Of course, Kaa could have crushed a dozen Mowglis if he had let himself go; but he played carefully, and never loosed one tenth of his power. Ever since Mowgli was strong enough to endure a little rough handling, Kaa had taught him this game, and it suppled his limbs as nothing else could. Sometimes Mowgli would stand lapped almost to his throat in Kaa"s shifting coils, striving to get one arm free and catch him by the throat. Then Kaa would give way limply, and Mowgli, with both quick-moving feet, would try to cramp the purchase of that huge tail as it flung backward feeling for a rock or a stump. They would rock to and fro, head to head, each waiting for his chance, till the beautiful, statue-like group melted in a whirl of black-and-yellow coils and struggling legs and arms, to rise up again and again. "Now!
now! now!" said Kaa, making feints with his head that even Mowgli"s quick hand could not turn aside. "Look! I touch thee here, Little Brother! Here, and here! Are thy hands numb? Here again!"
The game always ended in one way--with a straight, driving blow of the head that knocked the boy over and over. Mowgli could never learn the guard for that lightning lunge, and, as Kaa said, there was not the least use in trying.
"Good hunting!" Kaa grunted at last; and Mowgli, as usual, was shot away half a dozen yards, gasping and laughing. He rose with his fingers full of gra.s.s, and followed Kaa to the wise snake"s pet bathing-place--a deep, pitchy-black pool surrounded with rocks, and made interesting by sunken tree-stumps. The boy slipped in, Jungle-fashion, without a sound, and dived across; rose, too, without a sound, and turned on his back, his arms behind his head, watching the moon rising above the rocks, and breaking up her reflection in the water with his toes. Kaa"s diamond-shaped head cut the pool like a razor, and came out to rest on Mowgli"s shoulder. They lay still, soaking luxuriously in the cool water.
"It is _very_ good," said Mowgli at last, sleepily. "Now, in the Man-Pack, at this hour, as I remember, they laid them down upon hard pieces of wood in the inside of a mud-trap, and, having carefully shut out all the clean winds, drew foul cloth over their heavy heads, and made evil songs through their noses. It is better in the Jungle."
A hurrying cobra slipped down over a rock and drank, gave them "Good hunting!" and went away.
"Sssh!" said Kaa, as though he had suddenly remembered something. "So the Jungle gives thee all that thou hast ever desired, Little Brother?"
"Not all," said Mowgli, laughing; "else there would be a new and strong Shere Khan to kill once a moon. Now, I could kill with my own hands, asking no help of buffaloes. And also I have wished the sun to shine in the middle of the Rains, and the Rains to cover the sun in the deep of summer; and also I have never gone empty but I wished that I had killed a goat; and also I have never killed a goat but I wished it had been buck; nor buck but I wished it had been nilghai.
But thus do we feel, all of us."
"Thou hast no other desire?" the big snake demanded.
"What more can I wish? I have the Jungle, and the favor of the Jungle!
Is there more anywhere between sunrise and sunset?"
"Now, the Cobra said--" Kaa began.
"What cobra? He that went away just now said nothing. He was hunting."
"It was another."
"Hast thou many dealings with the Poison People? I give them their own path. They carry death in the fore-tooth, and that is not good--for they are so small. But what hood is this thou hast spoken with?"
Kaa rolled slowly in the water like a steamer in a beam sea. "Three or four moons since," said he, "I hunted in Cold Lairs, which place thou hast not forgotten. And the thing I hunted fled shrieking past the tanks and to that house whose side I once broke for thy sake, and ran into the ground."
"But the people of Cold Lairs do not live in burrows." Mowgli knew that Kaa was talking of the Monkey People.
"This thing was not living, but seeking to live," Kaa replied, with a quiver of his tongue. "He ran into a burrow that led very far. I followed, and having killed, I slept. When I waked I went forward."
"Under the earth?"
"Even so, coming at last upon a White Hood [a white cobra], who spoke of things beyond my knowledge, and showed me many things I had never before seen."
"New game? Was it good hunting?" Mowgli turned quickly on his side.
"It was no game, and would have broken all my teeth; but the White Hood said that a man--he spoke as one that knew the breed--that a man would give the breath under his ribs for only the sight of those things."
"We will look," said Mowgli. "I now remember that I was once a man."
"Slowly--slowly. It was haste killed the Yellow Snake that ate the sun. We two spoke together under the earth, and I spoke of thee, naming thee as a man. Said the White Hood (and he is indeed as old as the Jungle): "It is long since I have seen a man. Let him come, and he shall see all these things, for the least of which very many men would die.""
"That _must_ be new game. And yet the Poison People do not tell us when game is afoot. They are an unfriendly folk."
"It is _not_ game. It is--it is--I cannot say what it is."
"We will go there. I have never seen a White Hood, and I wish to see the other things. Did he kill them?"
"They are all dead things. He says he is the keeper of them all."
"Ah! As a wolf stands above meat he has taken to his own lair. Let us go."
Mowgli swam to bank, rolled on the gra.s.s to dry himself, and the two set off for Cold Lairs, the deserted city of which you may have heard.
Mowgli was not the least afraid of the Monkey People in those days, but the Monkey People had the liveliest horror of Mowgli. Their tribes, however, were raiding in the Jungle, and so Cold Lairs stood empty and silent in the moonlight. Kaa led up to the ruins of the queen"s pavilion that stood on the terrace, slipped over the rubbish, and dived down the half-choked staircase that went underground from the center of the pavilion. Mowgli gave the snake-call--"We be of one blood, ye and I,"--and followed on his hands and knees. They crawled a long distance down a sloping pa.s.sage that turned and twisted several times, and at last came to where the root of some great tree, growing thirty feet overhead, had forced out a solid stone in the wall. They crept through the gap, and found themselves in a large vault, whose domed roof had been also broken away by tree-roots so that a few streaks of light dropped down into the darkness.
"A safe lair," said Mowgli, rising to his firm feet, "but over far to visit daily. And now what do we see?"
"Am I nothing?" said a voice in the middle of the vault; and Mowgli saw something white move till, little by little, there stood up the hugest cobra he had ever set eyes on--a creature nearly eight feet long, and bleached by being in darkness to an old ivory-white. Even the spectacle-marks of his spread hood had faded to faint yellow. His eyes were as red as rubies, and altogether he was most wonderful.
"Good hunting!" said Mowgli, who carried his manners with his knife, and that never left him.
"What of my city?" said the White Cobra, without answering the greeting. "What of the great, the walled city--the city of a hundred elephants and twenty thousand horses, and cattle past counting--the city of the King of Twenty Kings? I grow deaf here, and it is long since I heard their war-gongs."
"The Jungle is above our heads," said Mowgli. "I know only Hathi and his sons among elephants. Bagheera has slain all the horses in one village, and--what is a King?"
"I told thee," said Kaa softly to the Cobra--"I told thee, four moons ago, that thy city was not."
"The city--the great city of the forest whose gates are guarded by the King"s towers--can never pa.s.s. They builded it before my father"s father came from the egg, and it shall endure when my son"s sons are as white as I! Salomdhi, son of Chandrabija, son of Viyeja, son of Yegasuri, made it in the days of Bappa Rawal. Whose cattle are _ye_?"
"It is a lost trail," said Mowgli, turning to Kaa. "I know not his talk."
"Nor I. He is very old. Father of Cobras, there is only the Jungle here, as it has been since the beginning."
"Then who is _he_," said the White Cobra, "sitting down before me, unafraid, knowing not the name of the King, talking our talk through a man"s lips? Who is he with the knife and the snake"s tongue?"
"Mowgli they call me," was the answer. "I am of the Jungle. The Wolves are my people, and Kaa here is my brother. Father of Cobras, who art thou?"
"I am the Warden of the King"s Treasure. Kurrun Raja builded the stone above me, in the days when my skin was dark, that I might teach death to those who came to steal. Then they let down the treasure through the stone, and I heard the song of the Brahmins my masters."
"Umm!" said Mowgli to himself. "I have dealt with one Brahmin already, in the Man-Pack, and--I know what I know. Evil comes here in a little."
"Five times since I came here has the stone been lifted, but always to let down more, and never to take away. There are no riches like these riches--the treasures of a hundred kings. But it is long and long since the stone was last moved, and I think that my city has forgotten."