quotes_apr22_2001.htm

…It was a perfect white night, as they call it. All green things seemed to have made a month’s growth since the morning. The branch that was yellow-leaved the day before dripped sap … The mosses curled deep and warm over his feet, the young grass had no cutting edge, and all the voices of the jungle boomed like one deep harp-string touched by the moon – the Moon of New Talk, who splashed her light full on rock and pool, slipped it between trunk and creeper, and sifted it through a million leaves…

This is from ‘The Second Jungle Book’.

Mowgli is reaching his full strength, and when Spring comes in the jungle, he is feeling restless and ill at ease with himself. He decides to make a running through the night, to the marshes of the north.

His back view was immensely respectable, for he stood nearly six feet high, and looked rather like a very proper bald-headed parson. In front it was different, for his Alley Sloper-like head and neck had not a feather to them, and there was a horrible raw-skin pouch on his neck under his chin – a hold-all for the things his pick-axe beak might steal…

This is from ‘The Undertakers’, in ‘The Second Jungle Book’, in which three scavengers, the Adjutant Crane, the Jackal, and the Mugger of Mugger-Ghaut, are exchanging reminiscences under the shadow of a new railway bridge across the river. The Mugger tells of how years ago he had tried to snatch an English child from a boat, during the Mutiny time, when many bodies floated down the stream. At the end of the tale, that child, now grown up, has his revenge, by blasting the Mugger to death with elephant gun and Martini.

The length of the gorge was hung, as it were, with black shimmery velvet curtains … the clotted millions of the sleeping bees….As he listened, he heard more than once the rustle and slide of a honey-loaded comb turning over or falling away somewhere in the dark galleries; then a booming of angry wings and the sullen drip, drip, drip, of the wasted honey, guttering along till it lipped lipped over some ledge in the open air …

This is from ‘Red Dog’ in ‘The Second Jungle Book’.

Mowgli is seeking a way of weakening the threat to his Seonee wolf-pack from a troop of red dogs, hunting ‘dholes’. Following the wisdom of Kaa, the ancient rock python, Mowgli plans to lead the dholes into a trap in the Bee Rocks above the Waingunga, where it is death for any animal to stray.