the distance.
By the Broken Lock that freed me, said Bagheera, when twilight had
fallen, thou art no slow goer!
I am hungry, said Kaa. Besides, they called me speckled frog.
Worm--earth-worm, and yellow to boot.
All one. Let us go on, and Kaa seemed to pour himself along the
ground, finding the shortest road with his steady eyes, and keeping to
it.
In the Cold Lairs the Monkey-People were not thinking of Mowgli s
friends at all. They had brought the boy to the Lost City, and were
very much pleased with themselves for the time. Mowgli had never seen an
Indian city before, and though this was almost a heap of ruins it seemed
very wonderful and splendid. Some king had built it long ago on a little
hill. You could still trace the stone causeways that led up to the
ruined gates where the last splinters of wood hung to the worn, rusted
hinges. Trees had grown into and out of the walls; the battlements were
tumbled down and decayed, and wild creepers hung out of the windows of
the towers on the walls in bushy hanging clumps.
A great roofless palace crowned the hill, and the marble of the
courtyards and the fountains was split, and stained with red and green,
and the very cobblestones in the courtyard where the king s elephants
used to live had been thrust up and apart by grasses and young trees.
From the palace you could see the rows and rows of roofless houses that
made up the city looking like empty honeycombs filled with blackness;
the shapeless block of stone that had been an idol in the square where
four roads met; the pits and dimples at street corners where the public
wells once stood, and the shattered domes of temples with wild figs
sprouting on their sides. The monkeys called the place their city, and
pretended to despise the Jungle-People because they lived in the forest.
And yet they never knew what the buildings were made for nor how to
use them. They would sit in circles on the hall of the king s council
chamber, and scratch for fleas and pretend to be men; or they would run
in and out of the roofless houses and collect pieces of plaster and old
bricks in a corner, and forget where they had hidden them, and fight
35