mynameis
23-05-2007, 02:51 AM
The Man Who Would Be King
“One of the men opens a black hair bag and I slips the crown on. It was too small and too heavy, but I wore it for the glory. Hammered gold it was — five pound weight, like a hoop of a barrel.
“‘Peachey,’ says Dravot, ‘we don’t want to fight no more. The Craft’s the trick so help me!’ and he brings forward that same Chief that I left at Bashkai — Billy Fish we called him afterwards, because he was so like Billy Fish that drove the big tank-engine at Mach on the Bolan in the old days. ‘Shake hands with him,’ says Dravot, and I shook hands and nearly dropped, for Billy Fish gave me the Grip. I said nothing, but tried him with the Fellow Craft Grip. He answers, all right, and I tried the Master’s Grip, but that was a slip. ‘A Fellow Craft he is!’ I says to Dan. ‘Does he know the word?’ ‘He does,’ says Dan, ‘and all the priests know. It’s a miracle! The Chiefs and the priest can work a Fellow Craft Lodge in a way that’s very like ours, and they’ve cut the marks on the rocks, but they don’t know the Third Degree, and they’ve come to find out. It’s Gord’s Truth. I’ve known these long years that the Afghans knew up to the Fellow Craft Degree, but this is a miracle. A god and a Grand-Master of the Craft am I, and a Lodge in the Third Degree I will open, and we’ll raise the head priests and the Chiefs of the villages.’
“‘It’s against all the law,’ I says, ‘holding a Lodge without warrant from any one; and we never held office in any Lodge.’
“‘It’s a master-stroke of policy,’ says Dravot. ‘It means running the country as easy as a four-wheeled bogy on a down grade. We can’t stop to inquire now, or they’ll turn against us. I’ve forty Chiefs at my heel, and passed and raised according to their merit they shall be. Billet these men on the villages and see that we run up a Lodge of some kind. The temple of Imbra will do for the Lodge-room. The women must make aprons as you show them. I’ll hold a levee of Chiefs tonight and Lodge to-morrow.’
“I was fair rim off my legs, but I wasn’t such a fool as not to see what a pull this Craft business gave us. I showed the priests’ families how to make aprons of the degrees, but for Dravot’s apron the blue border and marks was made of turquoise lumps on white hide, not cloth. We took a great square stone in the temple for the Master’s chair, and little stones for the officers’ chairs, and painted the black pavement with white squares, and did what we could to make things regular.
“At the levee which was held that night on the hillside with big bonfires, Dravot gives out that him and me were gods and sons of Alexander, and Past Grand-Masters in the Craft, and was come to make Kafiristan a country where every man should eat in peace and drink in quiet, and specially obey us. Then the Chiefs come round to shake hands, and they was so hairy and white and fair it was just shaking hands with old friends. We gave them names according as they was like men we had known in India — Billy Fish, Holly Dilworth, Pikky Kergan that was Bazar-master when I was at Mhow, and so on, and so on.
“The most amazing miracle was at Lodge next night. One of the old priests was watching us continuous, and I felt uneasy, for I knew we’d have to fudge the Ritual, and I didn’t know what the men knew. The old priest was a stranger come in from beyond the village of Bashkai. The minute Dravot puts on the Master’s apron that the girls had made for him, the priest fetches a whoop and a howl, and tries to overturn the stone that Dravot was sitting on. ‘It’s all up now,’ I says. ‘That comes of meddling with the Craft without warrant!’ Dravot never winked an eye, not when ten priests took and tilted over the Grand-Master’s chair — which was to say the stone of Imbra. The priest begins rubbing the bottom end of it to clear away the black dirt, and presently he shows all the other priests the Master’s Mark, same as was on Dravot’s apron, cut into the stone. Not even the priests of the temple of Imbra knew it was there. The old chap falls flat on his face at Dravot’s feet and kisses ’em. ‘Luck again,’ says Dravot, across the Lodge to me, ‘they say it’s the missing Mark that no one could understand the why of. We’re more than safe now.’ Then he bangs the butt of his gun for a gavel and says:— ‘By virtue of the authority vested in me by my own right hand and the help of Peachey, I declare myself Grand-Master of all Freemasonry in Kafiristan in this the Mother Lodge o’ the country, and King of Kafiristan equally with Peachey!’ At that he puts on his crown and I puts on mine — I was doing Senior Warden — and we opens the Lodge in most ample form. It was a amazing miracle! The priests moved in Lodge through the first two degrees almost without telling, as if the memory was coming back to them. After that, Peachey and Dravot raised such as was worthy — high priests and Chiefs of far-off villages. Billy Fish was the first, and I can tell you we scared the soul out of him. It was not in any way according to Ritual, but it served our turn. We didn’t raise more than ten of the biggest men because we didn’t want to make the Degree common. And they was clamoring to be raised.
“‘In another six months,’ says Dravot, ‘we’ll hold another Communication and see how you are working.’ Then he asks them about their villages, and learns that they was fighting one against the other and were fair sick and tired of it. And when they wasn’t doing that they was fighting with the Mohammedans. ‘You can fight those when they come into our country,’ says Dravot. ‘Tell off every tenth man of your tribes for a Frontier guard, and send two hundred at a time to this valley to be drilled. Nobody is going to be shot or speared any more so long as he does well, and I know that you won’t cheat me because you’re white people — sons of Alexander — and not like common, black Mohammedans. You are my people and by God,’ says he, running off into English at the end — ‘I’ll make a damned fine Nation of you, or I’ll die in the making!’
“I can’t tell all we did for the next six months because Dravot did a lot I couldn’t see the hang of, and he learned their lingo in a way I never could. My work was to help the people plough, and now and again to go out with some of the Army and see what the other villages were doing, and make ’em throw rope-bridges across the ravines which cut up the country horrid. Dravot was very kind to me, but when he walked up and down in the pine wood pulling that bloody red beard of his with both fists I knew he was thinking plans I could not advise him about, and I just waited for orders.
------------------------------------------------------------------
“But getting a wife was not as easy as Dan thought. He put it before the Council, and there was no answer till Billy Fish said that he’d better ask the girls. Dravot damned them all round. ‘What’s wrong with me?’ he shouts, standing by the idol Imbra. ‘Am I a dog or am I not enough of a man for your wenches? Haven’t I put the shadow of my hand over this country? Who stopped the last Afghan raid?’ It was me really, but Dravot was too angry to remember. ‘Who bought your guns? Who repaired the bridges? Who’s the Grand-Master of the sign cut in the stone?’ and he thumped his hand on the block that he used to sit on in Lodge, and at Council, which opened like Lodge always. Billy Fish said nothing and no more did the others. ‘Keep your hair on, Dan,’ said I; ‘and ask the girls. That’s how it’s done at home, and these people are quite English.’
“‘The marriage of a King is a matter of State,’ says Dan, in a white-hot rage, for he could feel, I hope, that he was going against his better mind. He walked out of the Council-room, and the others sat still, looking at the ground.
“‘Billy Fish,’ says I to the Chief of Bashkai, ‘what’s the difficulty here? A straight answer to a true friend.’ ‘You know,’ says Billy Fish. ‘How should a man tell you who know everything? How can daughters of men marry gods or devils? It’s not proper.’
“I remembered something like that in the Bible; but if, after seeing us as long as they had, they still believed we were gods it wasn’t for me to undeceive them.
“‘A god can do anything,’ says I. ‘If the King is fond of a girl he’ll not let her die.’ ‘She’ll have to,’ said Billy Fish. ‘There are all sorts of gods and devils in these mountains, and now and again a girl marries one of them and isn’t seen any more. Besides, you two know the Mark cut in the stone. Only the gods know that. We thought you were men till you showed the sign of the Master.’
“‘I wished then that we had explained about the loss of the genuine secrets of a Master-Mason at the first go-off; but I said nothing. All that night there was a blowing of horns in a little dark temple half-way down the hill, and I heard a girl crying fit to die. One of the priests told us that she was being prepared to marry the King.
“‘I’ll have no nonsense of that kind,’ says Dan. ‘I don’t want to interfere with your customs, but I’ll take my own wife. ‘The girl’s a little bit afraid,’ says the priest. ‘She thinks she’s going to die, and they are a-heartening of her up down in the temple.’
Addenum: From John Houston's Filmmaking by Lesley Brill Pg. 37.
"For Danny and Preachy, Freemasonry provides social placement comparable to what religion, trade, and art give indigenous people or British culture gives colonial bureaucrats. When Peachy steals Kipling's watch at the train station, he identifies as little with his own countryman as with the natives. But having discovered that he has robbed a fellow Mason, he takes great pains to undo th theft. As he restores the watch, he claims a bond with his fellow in "the craft." Kipling, in turn, agrees to set aside his own plans in order to deliver Peachy's message, "For the sake of the widow's son." To a skeptical official later, Kipling will explain that Freemasonry is "an ancient order dedicated to the brotherhood of man under the all-seeing eye of God...Once a Mason, always a Mason.""
“‘I’ll have no nonsense of that kind,’ says Dan. ‘I don’t want to interfere with your customs, but I’ll take my own wife. ‘The girl’s a little bit afraid,’ says the priest. ‘She thinks she’s going to die, and they are a-heartening of her up down in the temple.’
Addenum: From John Houston's Filmmaking by Lesley Brill Pg. 37.
"For Danny and Preachy, Freemasonry provides social placement comparable to what religion, trade, and art give indigenous people or British culture gives colonial bureaucrats. When Peachy steals Kipling's watch at the train station, he identifies as little with his own countryman as with the natives. But having discovered that he has robbed a fellow Mason, he takes great pains to undo th theft. As he restores the watch, he claims a bond with his fellow in "the craft." Kipling, in turn, agrees to set aside his own plans in order to deliver Peachy's message, "For the sake of the widow's son." To a skeptical official later, Kipling will explain that Freemasonry is "an ancient order dedicated to the brotherhood of man under the all-seeing eye of God...Once a Mason, always a Mason."
Fraternal connections figure heavily in the success that Danny and Peachy find in Kafiristan. "Wish us luck," says Peachy in response to Kipling's entreaties to give up their suicidal mission, "We met upon the level..." "...and we're passing on the square (Square: Miter Board Cap). Good Luck, indeed," replies Kipling. Reminded of their brotherhood, Kipling gives Danny his Masonic watch-chain token, which will save his life. When the high priest of Sikandergul opens Danny's tunic and prepares to stab him to test his godhead, he exposes Kipling's Masonic talisman, which duplicates the emblem left by Alexander (Alexander, The Great). Danny is thus confirmed as "Sikander's son," and accepted as ruler of the Kafirs and as immortal. "The craft, Danny, the craft - that's what saved us," exults Peachy.
Their salvation will be temporary, because Freemasonry is failed by Danny and Peachy. "Calm yourself, Brother Kipling," Danny says, "we've never taken advantage of a fellow in the craft." But they do take advantage of the priests of Sikandergul, whom they do not meet "on the the level" nor deal with "on the square (unequal in status)." They deceive and exploit their distant relations in Kafiristan, and fail to recognize them as part of the fellowship of man. As a result, they crash beneath the all-seeing eye of the highest of the local gods, Imbra - name that vaguely suggests the brotherhood that Danny and Peachy have betrayed.
As the iconography at the holy city of Sikandergul makes evident Freemasonry merges smoothly with religion. The incorporation of the Masonic "all-seeing eye" into the statues of Imbra emphasizes the connections. A man feigning divinity, Danny's robing is shown from a striking angle that at first dignifies him but that subsequent cinematography suggests to be an "Imbra's-eye view" of the proceedings. As Billy Fish difidently proposes later, "Imbra angry because son of man pretend to be a god." At the beginning of their masquerade, Danny prophetically voices doubts about his imposture: "The idea's a bit blasphemous, like.""
“One of the men opens a black hair bag and I slips the crown on. It was too small and too heavy, but I wore it for the glory. Hammered gold it was — five pound weight, like a hoop of a barrel.
“‘Peachey,’ says Dravot, ‘we don’t want to fight no more. The Craft’s the trick so help me!’ and he brings forward that same Chief that I left at Bashkai — Billy Fish we called him afterwards, because he was so like Billy Fish that drove the big tank-engine at Mach on the Bolan in the old days. ‘Shake hands with him,’ says Dravot, and I shook hands and nearly dropped, for Billy Fish gave me the Grip. I said nothing, but tried him with the Fellow Craft Grip. He answers, all right, and I tried the Master’s Grip, but that was a slip. ‘A Fellow Craft he is!’ I says to Dan. ‘Does he know the word?’ ‘He does,’ says Dan, ‘and all the priests know. It’s a miracle! The Chiefs and the priest can work a Fellow Craft Lodge in a way that’s very like ours, and they’ve cut the marks on the rocks, but they don’t know the Third Degree, and they’ve come to find out. It’s Gord’s Truth. I’ve known these long years that the Afghans knew up to the Fellow Craft Degree, but this is a miracle. A god and a Grand-Master of the Craft am I, and a Lodge in the Third Degree I will open, and we’ll raise the head priests and the Chiefs of the villages.’
“‘It’s against all the law,’ I says, ‘holding a Lodge without warrant from any one; and we never held office in any Lodge.’
“‘It’s a master-stroke of policy,’ says Dravot. ‘It means running the country as easy as a four-wheeled bogy on a down grade. We can’t stop to inquire now, or they’ll turn against us. I’ve forty Chiefs at my heel, and passed and raised according to their merit they shall be. Billet these men on the villages and see that we run up a Lodge of some kind. The temple of Imbra will do for the Lodge-room. The women must make aprons as you show them. I’ll hold a levee of Chiefs tonight and Lodge to-morrow.’
“I was fair rim off my legs, but I wasn’t such a fool as not to see what a pull this Craft business gave us. I showed the priests’ families how to make aprons of the degrees, but for Dravot’s apron the blue border and marks was made of turquoise lumps on white hide, not cloth. We took a great square stone in the temple for the Master’s chair, and little stones for the officers’ chairs, and painted the black pavement with white squares, and did what we could to make things regular.
“At the levee which was held that night on the hillside with big bonfires, Dravot gives out that him and me were gods and sons of Alexander, and Past Grand-Masters in the Craft, and was come to make Kafiristan a country where every man should eat in peace and drink in quiet, and specially obey us. Then the Chiefs come round to shake hands, and they was so hairy and white and fair it was just shaking hands with old friends. We gave them names according as they was like men we had known in India — Billy Fish, Holly Dilworth, Pikky Kergan that was Bazar-master when I was at Mhow, and so on, and so on.
“The most amazing miracle was at Lodge next night. One of the old priests was watching us continuous, and I felt uneasy, for I knew we’d have to fudge the Ritual, and I didn’t know what the men knew. The old priest was a stranger come in from beyond the village of Bashkai. The minute Dravot puts on the Master’s apron that the girls had made for him, the priest fetches a whoop and a howl, and tries to overturn the stone that Dravot was sitting on. ‘It’s all up now,’ I says. ‘That comes of meddling with the Craft without warrant!’ Dravot never winked an eye, not when ten priests took and tilted over the Grand-Master’s chair — which was to say the stone of Imbra. The priest begins rubbing the bottom end of it to clear away the black dirt, and presently he shows all the other priests the Master’s Mark, same as was on Dravot’s apron, cut into the stone. Not even the priests of the temple of Imbra knew it was there. The old chap falls flat on his face at Dravot’s feet and kisses ’em. ‘Luck again,’ says Dravot, across the Lodge to me, ‘they say it’s the missing Mark that no one could understand the why of. We’re more than safe now.’ Then he bangs the butt of his gun for a gavel and says:— ‘By virtue of the authority vested in me by my own right hand and the help of Peachey, I declare myself Grand-Master of all Freemasonry in Kafiristan in this the Mother Lodge o’ the country, and King of Kafiristan equally with Peachey!’ At that he puts on his crown and I puts on mine — I was doing Senior Warden — and we opens the Lodge in most ample form. It was a amazing miracle! The priests moved in Lodge through the first two degrees almost without telling, as if the memory was coming back to them. After that, Peachey and Dravot raised such as was worthy — high priests and Chiefs of far-off villages. Billy Fish was the first, and I can tell you we scared the soul out of him. It was not in any way according to Ritual, but it served our turn. We didn’t raise more than ten of the biggest men because we didn’t want to make the Degree common. And they was clamoring to be raised.
“‘In another six months,’ says Dravot, ‘we’ll hold another Communication and see how you are working.’ Then he asks them about their villages, and learns that they was fighting one against the other and were fair sick and tired of it. And when they wasn’t doing that they was fighting with the Mohammedans. ‘You can fight those when they come into our country,’ says Dravot. ‘Tell off every tenth man of your tribes for a Frontier guard, and send two hundred at a time to this valley to be drilled. Nobody is going to be shot or speared any more so long as he does well, and I know that you won’t cheat me because you’re white people — sons of Alexander — and not like common, black Mohammedans. You are my people and by God,’ says he, running off into English at the end — ‘I’ll make a damned fine Nation of you, or I’ll die in the making!’
“I can’t tell all we did for the next six months because Dravot did a lot I couldn’t see the hang of, and he learned their lingo in a way I never could. My work was to help the people plough, and now and again to go out with some of the Army and see what the other villages were doing, and make ’em throw rope-bridges across the ravines which cut up the country horrid. Dravot was very kind to me, but when he walked up and down in the pine wood pulling that bloody red beard of his with both fists I knew he was thinking plans I could not advise him about, and I just waited for orders.
------------------------------------------------------------------
“But getting a wife was not as easy as Dan thought. He put it before the Council, and there was no answer till Billy Fish said that he’d better ask the girls. Dravot damned them all round. ‘What’s wrong with me?’ he shouts, standing by the idol Imbra. ‘Am I a dog or am I not enough of a man for your wenches? Haven’t I put the shadow of my hand over this country? Who stopped the last Afghan raid?’ It was me really, but Dravot was too angry to remember. ‘Who bought your guns? Who repaired the bridges? Who’s the Grand-Master of the sign cut in the stone?’ and he thumped his hand on the block that he used to sit on in Lodge, and at Council, which opened like Lodge always. Billy Fish said nothing and no more did the others. ‘Keep your hair on, Dan,’ said I; ‘and ask the girls. That’s how it’s done at home, and these people are quite English.’
“‘The marriage of a King is a matter of State,’ says Dan, in a white-hot rage, for he could feel, I hope, that he was going against his better mind. He walked out of the Council-room, and the others sat still, looking at the ground.
“‘Billy Fish,’ says I to the Chief of Bashkai, ‘what’s the difficulty here? A straight answer to a true friend.’ ‘You know,’ says Billy Fish. ‘How should a man tell you who know everything? How can daughters of men marry gods or devils? It’s not proper.’
“I remembered something like that in the Bible; but if, after seeing us as long as they had, they still believed we were gods it wasn’t for me to undeceive them.
“‘A god can do anything,’ says I. ‘If the King is fond of a girl he’ll not let her die.’ ‘She’ll have to,’ said Billy Fish. ‘There are all sorts of gods and devils in these mountains, and now and again a girl marries one of them and isn’t seen any more. Besides, you two know the Mark cut in the stone. Only the gods know that. We thought you were men till you showed the sign of the Master.’
“‘I wished then that we had explained about the loss of the genuine secrets of a Master-Mason at the first go-off; but I said nothing. All that night there was a blowing of horns in a little dark temple half-way down the hill, and I heard a girl crying fit to die. One of the priests told us that she was being prepared to marry the King.
“‘I’ll have no nonsense of that kind,’ says Dan. ‘I don’t want to interfere with your customs, but I’ll take my own wife. ‘The girl’s a little bit afraid,’ says the priest. ‘She thinks she’s going to die, and they are a-heartening of her up down in the temple.’
Addenum: From John Houston's Filmmaking by Lesley Brill Pg. 37.
"For Danny and Preachy, Freemasonry provides social placement comparable to what religion, trade, and art give indigenous people or British culture gives colonial bureaucrats. When Peachy steals Kipling's watch at the train station, he identifies as little with his own countryman as with the natives. But having discovered that he has robbed a fellow Mason, he takes great pains to undo th theft. As he restores the watch, he claims a bond with his fellow in "the craft." Kipling, in turn, agrees to set aside his own plans in order to deliver Peachy's message, "For the sake of the widow's son." To a skeptical official later, Kipling will explain that Freemasonry is "an ancient order dedicated to the brotherhood of man under the all-seeing eye of God...Once a Mason, always a Mason.""
“‘I’ll have no nonsense of that kind,’ says Dan. ‘I don’t want to interfere with your customs, but I’ll take my own wife. ‘The girl’s a little bit afraid,’ says the priest. ‘She thinks she’s going to die, and they are a-heartening of her up down in the temple.’
Addenum: From John Houston's Filmmaking by Lesley Brill Pg. 37.
"For Danny and Preachy, Freemasonry provides social placement comparable to what religion, trade, and art give indigenous people or British culture gives colonial bureaucrats. When Peachy steals Kipling's watch at the train station, he identifies as little with his own countryman as with the natives. But having discovered that he has robbed a fellow Mason, he takes great pains to undo th theft. As he restores the watch, he claims a bond with his fellow in "the craft." Kipling, in turn, agrees to set aside his own plans in order to deliver Peachy's message, "For the sake of the widow's son." To a skeptical official later, Kipling will explain that Freemasonry is "an ancient order dedicated to the brotherhood of man under the all-seeing eye of God...Once a Mason, always a Mason."
Fraternal connections figure heavily in the success that Danny and Peachy find in Kafiristan. "Wish us luck," says Peachy in response to Kipling's entreaties to give up their suicidal mission, "We met upon the level..." "...and we're passing on the square (Square: Miter Board Cap). Good Luck, indeed," replies Kipling. Reminded of their brotherhood, Kipling gives Danny his Masonic watch-chain token, which will save his life. When the high priest of Sikandergul opens Danny's tunic and prepares to stab him to test his godhead, he exposes Kipling's Masonic talisman, which duplicates the emblem left by Alexander (Alexander, The Great). Danny is thus confirmed as "Sikander's son," and accepted as ruler of the Kafirs and as immortal. "The craft, Danny, the craft - that's what saved us," exults Peachy.
Their salvation will be temporary, because Freemasonry is failed by Danny and Peachy. "Calm yourself, Brother Kipling," Danny says, "we've never taken advantage of a fellow in the craft." But they do take advantage of the priests of Sikandergul, whom they do not meet "on the the level" nor deal with "on the square (unequal in status)." They deceive and exploit their distant relations in Kafiristan, and fail to recognize them as part of the fellowship of man. As a result, they crash beneath the all-seeing eye of the highest of the local gods, Imbra - name that vaguely suggests the brotherhood that Danny and Peachy have betrayed.
As the iconography at the holy city of Sikandergul makes evident Freemasonry merges smoothly with religion. The incorporation of the Masonic "all-seeing eye" into the statues of Imbra emphasizes the connections. A man feigning divinity, Danny's robing is shown from a striking angle that at first dignifies him but that subsequent cinematography suggests to be an "Imbra's-eye view" of the proceedings. As Billy Fish difidently proposes later, "Imbra angry because son of man pretend to be a god." At the beginning of their masquerade, Danny prophetically voices doubts about his imposture: "The idea's a bit blasphemous, like.""