AtDTDA: 227 (8) Madame Natalia Eskimoff.

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

A slight correction:

        "started coming at his in twos." 226. 3. 5

should be:

        "started coming at him in twos." 226. 3. 5

"The Great Game" 227. 1

        It is temptingly easy to dismiss Kipling as a 
        'mere' barroom poet, a jingoist and master 
        ideologue of empire. Certainly, much of his 
        work fits that description quite well. However, 
        'Kim' is a text that triumphantly transcends 
        the standard Kipling 'box', even though it is 
        transcribed within the discourses and 
        practices of British colonialism in the Indian 
        sub-continent, with all the markers of late 
        Victorian British India where the ultimate 
        beneficiary was the 'kaiser-i-hind' i.e. Victoria 
        herself and all the engines of 19th century 
        capitalism that looked upto her as their 
        ultimate symbol and sanctification.
	 Above all, 'Kim' is a work in which the 
        'white man's burden' (one of Kipling's 
        favorite phrases) is superseded by Kim 
        O'Hara's sheer joyous adoration of the 
        wonderfully chaotic Indian landscape, a 
        landscape fraught with paradox as it 
        embraces fakir and faker, mystical seekers 
        and sordid politicos, a good-humored 
        multiculturalism and hyper-volatile racial 
        and religious conflict, all in the same breath. 
        At the heart of the novel is the dichotomy 
        between the Great Game and the Meta-Game.
        The Great Game is the twist and weave of 
        British colonial/military intelligence operations 
        in the Indian sub-continent and through the 
        length and breadth of the British Empire. Not 
        amazingly, the Great Game is headed by a 
        Colonel Creighton who is an ethnographer. 
        The connections between anthropology and 
        empire are well known.

        As Edward Said points out in his introduction
        to the Penguin edition, "anthropologists and 
        ethnographers were also advisors to colonial 
        rulers on the manners and mores of the 
        native people to be ruled." 

http://www.namaste-bazaar.com/generic49.html

        The professors' manoeuvrings had at least the grace 
        to avoid the mirrorlike---if symmetries arose now and 
        then, it was written off to accident, "some predisposition 
        to the echoic," as Werfner put it, "perhaps built into the 
        nature of Time," added Renfrew. 227. 1/4

As if previously they were one ray of light, now split 
into two. I confess that I there's something 
happening here, but I don't know what it is. But I'd 
suspect there's a light/physics metaphor going on 
at this juncture.

There's Doylesque atmosphere:

         . . . .a ragged arrangement of voids and unlighted 
        windows to what in the daytime, Lew hoped, would 
        not be as sinister as now. 227 19.20


        Madame Natalia Eskimoff's rooms ran to mamluk 
        lamps and draped fabrics in Indian prints, smoke 
        rising from elaborate brass incense burners. . . .
        227. 21/22

Sounds like my kinda place! Lew's too, as he gets the hots for the "Estatica"
in a scene that reminds me of the lovely sequence in Mason & Dixon where 
Dixon takes a mighty hankerin for Hespie:

        "Incredible! Why, you must be a very Scryess. . .? 
        Dixon having already spied, beneath her layers of 
        careful Decrepitude (as he will later tell Mason) a 
        schockingly young Woman hard at work,---with 
        whom, country Lout that he is, he can't keep from 
        flirting. M & D 26

        Lew was enchanted right away, for the lady 
        herself was just a peach. Eyes huge and 
        expressive as those you'd expect to see 
        more in magazine illustrations than out of 
        this troublesome world. 227. 24/27

Interesting, a genre character---the psychical detective---falling for
a lady because she resembles a character of equal fictitiousness.
Or at least the right degree of fictitiousness.

        ". . . .tattooed in exquisite symmetry below Madame 
        Eskimoff's bared nape, the Kabbalist Tree of Life, 
        with the names of the Sephhiroth spelled out in 
        Hebrew. . . .227.

Crucial to all these ritual magic(k)/K/Q/Cabalistic movements of the era.
This tree is sourced from a modern O.T.O. source:

http://www.thelemapedia.org/images/9/97/Treeoflife0.gif

Naturally, this engenders 

         uniquely snot-nosed British anti-Semitism---
        "Eskimoff . . . I say what sort of name is that?" 
        227. 35/36 

        what in fact she turned out to be, confoundingly, 
        was a classic English Rose. 227. 38/39