Traffics and Discoveries by Rudyard Kipling

Dodo Collections brings you another classic from Rudyard Kipling, ‘Traffics and Discoveries.’   From The Captive: The guard-boat lay across the mouth of the bathing-pool, her crew idly spanking the water with the flat of their oars. A red-coated militia-man, rifle in hand, sat at the bows, and a petty officer at the stern. Between the snow-white cutter and the flat-topped, honey-colored rocks on the beach the green water was troubled with shrimp-pink prisoners-of-war bathing. Behind their orderly tin camp and the electric-light poles rose those stone-dotted spurs that throw heat on Simonstown. Beneath them the little Barracouta nodded to the big Gibraltar, and the old Penelope, that in ten years has been bachelors club, natural history museum, kindergarten, and prison, rooted and dug at her fixed moorings. Far out, a three-funnelled Atlantic transport with turtle bow and stern waddled in from the deep sea. Said the sentry, assured of the visitors good faith, Talk to em? You can, to any that speak English. Youll find a lot that do. Also includes the stories The Bonds of Discipline, A Sahibs War, Their Lawful Occasions, The Comprehension of Private Copper, Steam Tactics, Wireless, The Army of a Dream, They, Mrs. Bathurst, and Below the Mill Dam, and the poems From the Masjid-al-Aqsa of Sayyid Ahmed, Poseidons Law, The Runners, The Wet Litany, The Kings Task, The Necessitarian, Kaspars Song in Varda, Song of the Old Guard, The Return of the Children, From Lydens Irenius, and Our Fathers Also.   Kiplings works of fiction include The Jungle Book (1894), Kim (1901), and many short stories, including The Man Who Would Be King (1888). His poems include Mandalay (1890), Gunga Din (1890), The Gods of the Copybook Headings (1919), The White Mans Burden (1899), and If— (1910). He is regarded as a major innovator in the art of the short story; his childrens books are classics of childrens literature; and one critic described his work as exhibiting a versatile and luminous narrative gift.   Kipling was one of the most popular writers in England, in both prose and verse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Henry James said: Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known. In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English-language writer to receive the prize, and its youngest recipient to date Among other honours, he was sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and on several occasions for a knighthood, all of which he declined.