quotes_may25_2017.htm

… he could not help enjoying the wild rush, though the glimpses of earth far down below frightened him, and the terrible check and jerk at the end of the swing over nothing but empty air brought his heart between his teeth. His escort would rush him up a tree till he felt the thinnest topmost branches crackle and bend under them, and then with a cough and a whoop would fling themselves into the air outward and downward, and bring up, hanging by their hands or their feet to the lower limbs of the next tree.

This is from “Kaa’s Hunting” in The Jungle Book.

Mowgli has been making friends with the Bandar-log, the monkeys. Wise old Baloo, his teacher, has explained the contempt others feel for the monkey-folk, as a people without the Law of the Jungle. Shortly after his warning is borne out when the Bandar-log kidnap Mowgli and carry him off to the ruined city of Cold Lairs, from where he is rescued by Kaa, the great rock python.

For centuries the Little People had hived and swarmed from cleft to cleft, and swarmed again, staining the white marble with stale honey, and made their combs tall and deep in the dark of the inner caves, where neither man nor beast nor fire nor water had ever touched them. The length of the gorge on both sues was hung as it were with black shimmery velvet curtains, and Mowgli sank as he looked, for those were the clotted millions of the sleeping bees.

This is from “Red Dog” in The Second Jungle Book.

Mowgli has sought advice from Kaa, the great python, on how to deal with the dholes, the red dogs whose pack is threatening his wolves and their territory. He will lead them into a trap, where they will be attacked by the deadly wild bees of India.

…It was a perfect white night, as they call it… 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 Spring Running” in The Second Jungle Book.

The Spring has come in a rush. Mowgli, now a young man grown to his full strength, feels restless and strange, and he decides to make a ‘spring running’ away to the marshes of the North