The two of them, laying [Kim] east and west, that the mysterious earth-currents which thrill the clay of our bodies might help and not hinder, took him to pieces all one long afternoon – bone by bone, muscle by muscle, ligament by ligament, and lastly, nerve by nerve. […] Kim slid ten thousand miles into slumber […] sleep that soaked like rain after drought. […] And Mother Earth was as faithful as the Sahiba. She breathed through him to restore the poise he had lost lying so long on a cot cut off from her good currents. His head lay powerless upon her breast, and his opened hands surrendered to her strength. The many-rooted tree above him, and even the dead-manhandled wood beside, knew what he sought, as he himself did not know. Hour upon hour he lay deeper than sleep.

Water was trickling from a score of places in the cut face of the hill, oozing between the edges of the steps and welling up between the stone slabs of the terrace. Trees sprouted in the sides of the tank and hid its surroundings. It seemed as though the descent had led the Englishman, firstly, two thousand years away from his own century, and secondly, into a trap, and that he would fall off the polished stones into the stinking tank, or that the Gau- Mukh [cow's mouth] would continue to pour water placidly until the tank rose up and swamped him, or that some of the stone slabs would fall and crush him flat.

Rudyard Kipling's descriptions of India, particularly in his verse and fiction, frequently contain images of a ‘feminine’ landscape, and his urban and rural environments are painted with brushstrokes that can be both hazily impressionistic and finely detailed. As the above epigraph from Kim shows, Kipling can seamlessly move from the healing Sahiba to the tender and protective Mother Earth who repairs Kim's fragmented soul at her breast. Yet Mother India can also be a terrifying entity for England's colonial sons, as these lines from his ‘A Vision of India’ demonstrate: