Sunday, October 11, 2009

"...dry roosts in the fern-wreathed trees, and the last puff of the day-wind brought from the unseen villages the scent of damp wood-smoke, hot cakes, dripping undergrowth, and rotting pine-cones. That is the true smell of the Himalayas, and if once it creeps into the blood of a man, that man will at the last, forgetting all else, return to the hills to die."

-Rudyard Kipling, Namgay Doola

6 comments:

Sroyon said...

How did you slip this post in, without my noticing it? Decidedly dubious.

Priyanka said...

I keep writing drafts all the time. Some I preset for publishing because it's a nice godlike thing to do, but sometimes I mess dates and timings up, with the result that some posts get displaced. Which is not a nice godlike thing to do.

Sroyon said...

I will preset one to be published after I die. That will be a nice bhoot-like thing to do.

new age scheherazade said...

Pinkaaaa how could this man be such a white man's burden type?

Priyanka said...

I don't know. Breaks my heart :(

Sroyon said...

Same with Macaulay.

"Let no man stop to plunder,
But slay, and slay, and slay;
The gods who live forever
Are on our side to-day."

Ki likhto. Porle rokto gorom hoye jaaye.

And then he goes and says that a single shelf of a good European library is worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.