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       Rudyard Kipling

      Rudyard Kipling: 440+ Short Stories in One Edition (Illustrated)

      Soldier's Three, The Jungle Book, The Phantom Rickshaw, Land and Sea Tales, The Eyes of Asia…

       Published by

       Musaicum Logo Books

      Advanced Digital Solutions & High-Quality eBook Formatting

       [email protected] 2017 OK Publishing ISBN 978-80-272-3274-1

      Table of Contents

       The City of Dreadful Night

       Plain Tales From the Hills

       Soldier’s Three

       Soldier’s Three - Part II

       The Phantom ‘Rickshaw and Other Ghost Stories

       Under the Deodars

       Wee Willie Winkie

       Life’s Handicap

       Many Inventions

       The Jungle Book

       The Second Jungle Book

       The Day’s Work

       Stalky and Co.

       Just So Stories

       Traffics and Discoveries

       Puck of Pook’s Hill

       Actions and Reactions

       Abaft the Funnel

       Rewards and Fairies

       The Eyes of Asia

       A Diversity of Creatures

       Land and Sea Tales

       Debits and Credits

       ‘Thy Servant a Dog’

       Limits and Renewals

      The City of Dreadful Night

       Table of Contents

       Chapter 1. A Real Live City

       Chapter 2. The Reflections of a Savage

       Chapter 3. The Council of the Gods

       Chapter 4. On the Banks of the Hughli

       Chapter 5. With the Calcutta Police

       Chapter 6. The City of Dreadful Night

       Chapter 7. Deeper and Deeper Still

       Chapter 8. Concerning Lucia

      Chapter 1.

       A Real Live City

       Table of Contents

      We are all backwoodsmen and barbarians together — we others dwelling beyond the Ditch, in the outer darkness of the Mofussil. There are no such things as Commissioners and heads of departments in the world, and there is only one city in India. Bombay is too green, too pretty, and too stragglesome; and Madras died ever so long ago. Let us take off our hats to Calcutta, the many-sided, the smoky, the magnificent, as we drive in over the Hughli Bridge in the dawn of a still February morning. We have left India behind us at Howrah Station, and now we enter foreign parts. No, not wholly foreign. Say rather too familiar.

      All men of a certain age know the feeling of caged irritation — an illustration in the Graphic, a bar of music or the light words of a friend from home may set it ablaze — that comes from the knowledge of our lost heritage of London. At Home they, the other men, our equals, have at their disposal all that Town can supply — the roar of the streets, the lights, the music, the pleasant places, the millions of their own kind, and a wilderness full of pretty, fresh-coloured Englishwomen, theatres and restaurants. It is their right. They accept it as such, and even affect to look upon it with contempt. And we — we have nothing except the few amusements that we painfully build up for ourselves — the dolorous dissipations of gymkhanas where every one knows everybody else, or the chastened intoxication of dances where all engagements are booked, in ink, ten days ahead, and where everybody’s antecedents are as patent as his or her method of waltzing. We have been deprived of our inheritance. The men at home are enjoying it all, not knowing how fair and rich it is, and we at the most can only fly westward for a few months and gorge what, properly speaking, should take seven or eight or ten luxurious years. That is the lost heritage of London; and the knowledge of the forfeiture, wilful or forced, comes to most men at times and seasons, and they get cross.

      Calcutta holds out false hopes of some return. The dense smoke hangs low, in the chill of the morning, over an ocean of roofs, and, as the city wakes, there goes up to the smoke a deep, full-throated boom of life and motion and humanity. For this reason does he who sees Calcutta for the first time hang joyously out of the ticca gharri and sniff the smoke, and turn his face toward the tumult, saying: ‘This is, at last, some portion of my heritage

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