放莽林进入(四)
【英】鲁迪亚德·吉卜林 著
熊良銋 译
附录:原文
Letting in the Jungle(IV)
Written by Rudyard Kipling
Translated by William Xiong
He went away, leaving Mowgli stabbing furiously with his
skinning-knife into the earth. Mowgli had never seen human blood in his life
before till he had seen, and — what meant much more to him — smelled Messua’s
blood on the thongs that bound her. And Messua had been kind to him, and, so
far as he knew anything about love, he loved Messua as completely as he hated
the rest of mankind. But deeply as he loathed them, their talk, their cruelty,
and their cowardice, not for anything the Jungle had to offer could he bring
himself to take a human life, and have that terrible scent of blood back again
in his nostrils. His plan was simpler, but much more thorough; and he laughed
to himself when he thought that it was on
“It WAS a Master-word,” Bagheera whispered in his ear. “They were feeding by the river, and they obeyed as though they were bullocks. Look where they come now!”
Hathi and his three sons had arrived, in their usual way,
without a sound. The mud of the river was still fresh on their flanks, and
Hathi was thoughtfully chewing the green stem of a young plantain-tree that he
had gouged up with his tusks. But every line in his vast body showed to
Bagheera, who could see things when he came across them, that it was not the
Master of the Jungle speaking to a Man-cub, but on
Mowgli hardly lifted his head as Hathi gave him “Good hunting.”
He kept him swinging and rocking, and shifting from on
“I will tell a tale that was told to me by the hunter ye hunted today,” said Mowgli. “It concerns an elephant, old and wise, who fell into a trap, and the sharpened stake in the pit scarred him from a little above his heel to the crest of his shoulder, leaving a white mark.” Mowgli threw out his hand, and as Hathi wheeled the moonlight showed a long white scar on his slaty side, as though he had been struck with a red-hot whip. “Men came to take him from the trap,” Mowgli continued, “but he broke his ropes, for he was strong, and went away till his wound was healed. Then came he, angry, by night to the fields of those hunters. And I remember now that he had three sons. These things happened many, many Rains ago, and very far away — among the fields of Bhurtpore. What came to those fields at the next reaping, Hathi?”
“They were reaped by me and by my three sons,” said Hathi.
“And to the ploughing that follows the reaping?” said Mowgli.
“There was no ploughing,” said Hathi.
“And to the men that live by the green crops on the ground?” said Mowgli.
“They went away.”
“And to the huts in which the men slept?” said Mowgli.
“We tore the roofs to pieces, and the Jungle swallowed up the walls,” said Hathi.
“And what more?” said Mowgli.
“As much good ground as I can walk over in two nights from the
east to the west, and from the north to the south as much as I can walk over in
three nights, the Jungle took. We let in the Jungle upon five villages; and in
those villages, and in their lands, the grazing-ground and the soft
crop-grounds, there is not on
“A man told me, and now I see even Buldeo can speak truth. It was well done, Hathi with the white mark; but the second time it shall be done better, for the reason that there is a man to direct. Thou knowest the village of the Man–Pack that cast me out? They are idle, senseless, and cruel; they play with their mouths, and they do not kill the weaker for food, but for sport. When they are full-fed they would throw their own breed into the Red Flower. This I have seen. It is not well that they should live here any more. I hate them!”
“Kill, then,” said the youngest of Hathi’s three sons, picking up a tuft of grass, dusting it against his fore-legs, and throwing it away, while his little red eyes glanced furtively from side to side.
“What good are white bones to me?” Mowgli answered angrily. “Am I the cub of a wolf to play in the sun with a raw head? I have killed Shere Khan, and his hide rots on the Council Rock; but — but I do not know whither Shere Khan is gone, and my stomach is still empty. Now I will take that which I can see and touch. Let in the Jungle upon that village, Hathi!”
Bagheera shivered, and cowered down. He could understand, if
the worst came to the worst, a quick rush down the village street, and a right
and left blow into a crowd, or a crafty killing of men as they ploughed in the
twilight; but this scheme for deliberately blotting out an entire village from
the eyes of man and beast frightened him. Now he saw why Mowgli had sent for
Hathi. No on
“Let them run as the men ran from the fields of Bhurtpore, till
we have the rain-water for the on
“But I— but we have no quarrel with them, and it needs the red rage of great pain ere we tear down the places where men sleep,” said Hathi doubtfully.
“Are ye the on
“There will be no killing? My tusks were red at the Sack of the Fields of Bhurtpore, and I would not wake that smell again.”
“Nor I. I do not wish even their bones to lie on the clean
earth. Let them go and find a fresh lair. They cannot stay here. I have seen
and smelled the blood of the woman that gave me food — the woman whom they
would have killed but for me. On
“Ah!” said Hathi. “So did the scar of the stake burn on my hide till we watched the villages die under in the spring growth. Now I see. Thy war shall be our war. We will let in the jungle!”
Mowgli had hardly time to catch his breath — he was shaking all over with rage and hate before the place where the elephants had stood was empty, and Bagheera was looking at him with terror.
“By the Broken Lock that freed me!” said the Black Panther at last. “Art THOU the naked thing I spoke for in the Pack when all was young? Master of the Jungle, when my strength goes, speak for me — speak for Baloo — speak for us all! We are cubs before thee! Snapped twigs under foot! Fawns that have lost their doe!”
The idea of Bagheera being a stray fawn upset Mowgli altogether, and he laughed and caught his breath, and sobbed and laughed again, till he had to jump into a pool to make himself stop. Then he swam round and round, ducking in and out of the bars of the moonlight like the frog, his namesake.
By this time Hathi and his three sons had turned, each to on
At the end of that time — and none knew who had started it — a
rumour went through the Jungle that there was better food and water to be found
in such and such a valley. The pig — who, of course, will go to the ends of the
earth for a full meal — moved first by companies, scuffling over the rocks, and
the deer followed, with the small wild foxes that live on the dead and dying of
the herds; and the heavy-shouldered nilghai moved parallel with the deer, and
the wild buffaloes of the swamps came after the nilghai. The least little thing
would have turned the scattered, straggling droves that grazed and sauntered
and drank and grazed again; but whenever there was an alarm some on
It was a dark night when Hathi and his three sons slipped down
from the Jungle, and broke off the poles of the machans with their trunks; they
fell as a snapped stalk of hemlock in bloom falls, and the men that tumbled
from them heard the deep gurgling of the elephants in their ears. Then the
vanguard of the bewildered armies of the deer broke down and flooded into the
village grazing-grounds and the ploughed fields; and the sharp-hoofed, rooting
wild pig came with them, and what the deer left the pig spoiled, and from time
to time an alarm of wolves would shake the herds, and they would rush to and
fro desperately, treading down the young barley, and cutting flat the banks of
the irrigating channels. Before the dawn broke the pressure on the outside of
the circle gave way at on
But the work was practically done. When the villagers looked in
the morning they saw their crops were lost. And that meant death if they did
not get away, for they lived year in and year out as near to starvation as the
Jungle was near to them. When the buffaloes were sent to graze the hungry
brutes found that the deer had cleared the grazing-grounds, and so wandered
into the Jungle and drifted off with their wild mates; and when twilight fell
the three or four ponies that belonged to the village lay in their stables with
their heads beaten in. On
The villagers had no heart to make fires in the fields that night, so Hathi and his three sons went gleaning among what was left; and where Hathi gleans there is no need to follow. The men decided to live on their stored seed-corn until the rains had fallen, and then to take work as servants till they could catch up with the lost year; but as the grain-dealer was thinking of his well-filled crates of corn, and the prices he would levy at the sale of it, Hathi’s sharp tusks were picking out the corner of his mud-house, and smashing open the big wicker chest, leeped with cow-dung, where the precious stuff lay.
When that last loss was discovered, it was the Brahmin’s turn
to speak. He had prayed to his own Gods without answer. It might be, he said,
that, unconsciously, the village had offended some on
There was no need to ask his meaning. The wild gourd would grow where they had worshipped their God, and the sooner they saved themselves the better.
But it is hard to tear a village from its moorings. They stayed on as long as any summer food was left to them, and they tried to gather nuts in the Jungle, but shadows with glaring eyes watched them, and rolled before them even at mid-day; and when they ran back afraid to their walls, on the tree-trunks they had passed not five minutes before the bark would be stripped and chiselled with the stroke of some great taloned paw. The more they kept to their village, the bolder grew the wild things that gambolled and bellowed on the grazing-grounds by the Waingunga. They had no time to patch and plaster the rear walls of the empty byres that backed on to the Jungle; the wild pig trampled them down, and the knotty-rooted vines hurried after and threw their elbows over the new-won ground, and the coarse grass bristled behind the vines like the lances of a goblin army following a retreat. The unmarried men ran away first, and carried the news far and near that the village was doomed. Who could fight, they said, against the Jungle, or the Gods of the Jungle, when the very village cobra had left his hole in the platform under the peepul-tree? So their little commerce with the outside world shrunk as the trodden paths across the open grew fewer and fainter. At last the nightly trumpetings of Hathi and his three sons ceased to trouble them; for they had no more to be robbed of. The crop on the ground and the seed in the ground had been taken. The outlying fields were already losing their shape, and it was time to throw themselves on the charity of the English at Khanhiwara.
Native fashion, they delayed their departure from on
They heard, as the last burdened family filed through the gate,
a crash of falling beams and thatch behind the walls. They saw a shiny, snaky
black trunk lifted for an instant, scattering sodden thatch. It disappeared,
and there was another crash, followed by a squeal. Hathi had been plucking off
the roofs of the huts as you pluck water-lilies, and a rebounding beam had
pricked him. He needed on
“The Jungle will swallow these shells,” said a quiet voice in the wreckage. “It is the outer wall that must lie down,” and Mowgli, with the rain sluicing over his bare shoulders and arms, leaped back from a wall that was settling like a tired buffalo.
“All in good time,” panted Hathi. “Oh, but my tusks were red at Bhurtpore; To the outer wall, children! With the head! Together! Now!”
The four pushed side by side; the outer wall bulged, split, and fell, and the villagers, dumb with horror, saw the savage, clay-streaked heads of the wreckers in the ragged gap. Then they fled, houseless and foodless, down the valley, as their village, shredded and tossed and trampled, melted behind them.
A month later the place was a dimpled mound, covered with soft, green young stuff; and by the end of the Rains there was the roaring jungle in full blast on the spot that had been under plough not six months before.
Mowgli’s Song Against People
I will let loose against you the fleet-footed vines —
I will call in the Jungle to stamp out your lines!
The roofs shall fade before it,
The house-beams shall fall,
And the Karela, the bitter Karela,
Shall cover it all!
In the gates of these your councils my people shall sing,
In the doors of these your garners the Bat-folk shall cling;
And the snake shall be your watchman,
By a hearthstone unswept;
For the Karela, the bitter Karela,
Shall fruit where ye slept!
Ye shall not see my strikers; ye shall hear them and guess;
By night, before the moon-rise, I will send for my cess,
And the wolf shall be your herdsman
By a landmark removed,
For the Karela, the bitter Karela,
Shall seed where ye loved!
I will reap your fields before you at the hands of a host;
Ye shall glean behind my reapers, for the bread that is lost,
And the deer shall be your oxen
By a headland untilled,
For the Karela, the bitter Karela,
Shall leaf where ye build!
I have untied against you the club-footed vines,
I have sent in the Jungle to swamp out your lines.
The trees — the trees are on you!
The house-beams shall fall,
And the Karela, the bitter Karela,
Shall cover you all!
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