Read more
Zusatztext By the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature “A work of positive genius! as radiant all over with intellectual light as the sky of a frosty night with stars.” —The Atlantic Monthly Informationen zum Autor Rudyard Kipling Klappentext An epic rendition of the imperial experience in India! one of Kipling's greatest works A Penguin Classic Kim! orphaned son of an Irish soldier and a poor white mother! and the lama! an old ascetic priest! are on a quest. Kim was born and raised in India and plays with the slum children as he lives on the streets! but he is white! a sahib! and wants to play the Great Game of Imperialism; while the priest must find redemption from the Wheel of Things. Kim celebrates their friendship and their journeys in a beautiful but hostile environment! capturing the opulence of the exotic landscape and the uneasy presence of the British Raj. Filled with rich description and vivid characters! this beguiling coming of age story is considered Kipling's masterpiece. For more than seventy years! Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1!700 titles! Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors! as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. Chapter I Oh ye who tread the Narrow Way By Tophet-flare to Judgment Day, Be gentle when the heathen pray To Buddha at Kamakura! He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam- Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher—the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum. Who hold Zam-Zammah, that “fire-breathing dragon,” hold the Punjab; for the great green-bronze piece is always first of the conqueror’s loot. There was some justification for Kim,—he had kicked Lala Dinanath’s boy off the trunnions,—since the English held the Punjab and Kim was English. Though he was burned black as any native; though he spoke the vernacular by preference, and his mother-tongue in a clipped uncertain sing-song; though he consorted on terms of perfect equality with the small boys of the bazar; Kim was white—a poor white of the very poorest. The half-caste woman who looked after him (she smoked opium, and pretended to keep a second-hand furniture shop by the square where the cheap cabs wait) told the missionaries that she was Kim’s mother’s sister; but his mother had been nursemaid in a colonel’s family and had married Kimball O’Hara, a young colour-sergeant of the Mavericks, an Irish regiment. He afterwards took a post on the Sind, Punjab, and Delhi railway, and his regiment went home without him. The wife died of cholera in Ferozepore, and O’Hara fell to drink and loafing up and down the line with the keen-eyed three-year-old baby. Societies and chaplains anxious for the child, tried to catch him, but O’Hara drifted away, till he came across the woman who took opium and learned the taste from her, and died as poor whites die in India. His estate at death consisted of three papers—one he called his “ne varietur” because those words were written below his signature thereon, and another his “clearance-certificate.” The third was Kim’s birth-certificate. Those things, he was used to say, in his glorious opium hours, would yet make little Kimball a man. On no account was Kim to part with them, for they belonged to a great piece of magic—such magic as men practised over yonder behind the Museum, in the big blue and white Jadoo-Gher—the Magic House, as we name the Masonic Lodge. It would, he said, all come right some day, and Kim’s horn would be exalted between pillars—monstrous pillars—of beauty and s...
