AtDTDA: (8) 226 Renfrew and Werfner

[Keith]

The Great Game, a term usually attributed to Arthur Conolly, was used  
to describe the rivalry and strategic conflict between the British  
Empire (Renfrew) and the Tsarist Russian Empire (Werfner) for  
supremacy in Central Asia. The term was later popularized by British  
novelist Rudyard Kipling in his work, Kim. The classic Great Game  
period is generally regarded as running from approximately 1813 to  
the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907. Following the Bolshevik  
Revolution of 1917 a second, less intensive phase followed. http:// 
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Game

Arthur Conolly (1807 - June 1842) (sometimes misspelled Connolly) was  
a British intelligence officer, explorer and writer. He was a captain  
of the Sixth Bengal Light Cavalry, who worked for the British East  
India Company. [...] Often travelling in disguise, he used the name  
"Khan Ali" in a word-play on his true name. http://en.wikipedia.org/ 
wiki/Arthur_Conolly

 From the beginning of Kipling's _Kim_:

[Kim's] estate at death consisted of three papers - one he called his  
'ne
varietur' because those words were written below his signature
thereon, and another his 'clearance-certificate'.  The third was
Kim's birth-certificate.  Those things, he was used to say, in his
glorious opium-hours, would yet make little Kimball a man.  On no
account was Kim to part with them, for they belonged to a great
piece of magic - such magic as men practised over yonder behind
the Museum, in the big blue-and-white Jadoo-Gher - the Magic
House, as we name the Masonic Lodge.  It would, he said, all come
right some day, and Kim's horn would be exalted between pillars -
monstrous pillars - of beauty and strength.  The Colonel himself,
riding on a horse, at the head of the finest Regiment in the
world, would attend to Kim - little Kim that should have been
better off than his father.  Nine hundred first-class devils,
whose God was a Red Bull on a green field, would attend to Kim,
if they had not forgotten O'Hara - poor O'Hara that was gang-
foreman on the Ferozepore line.  Then he would weep bitterly in
the broken rush chair on the veranda.  So it came about after his
death that the woman sewed parchment, paper, and birth-
certificate into a leather amulet-case which she strung round
Kim's neck.

[...]

'And I remember,' he quoted maliciously, 'one who said, "Trust a
snake before an harlot, and an harlot before a Pathan, Mahbub Ali."
Now, excepting as to Pathans, of whom I am one, all that is true.
Most true is it in the Great Game, for it is by means of women that
all plans come to ruin and we lie out in the dawning with our
throats cut.  So it happened to such a one.'  He gave the reddest
particulars.

'Then why -?'  Kim paused before a filthy staircase that climbed to
the warm darkness of an upper chamber, in the ward that is behind
Azim Ullah's tobacco-shop.  Those who know it call it The Birdcage -
it is so full of whisperings and whistlings and chirrupings.

The room, with its dirty cushions and half-smoked hookahs, smelt
abominably of stale tobacco.  In one corner lay a huge and shapeless
woman clad in greenish gauzes, and decked, brow, nose, ear, neck,
wrist, arm, waist, and ankle with heavy native jewellery.  When she
turned it was like the clashing of copper pots.  A lean cat in the
balcony outside the window mewed hungrily.  Kim checked, bewildered,
at the door-curtain.

'Is that the new stuff, Mahbub?'  said Huneefa lazily, scarce
troubling to remove the mouthpiece from her lips.  'O Buktanoos!'  -
like most of her kind, she swore by the Djinns - 'O Buktanoos!  He is
very good to look upon.'

'That is part of the selling of the horse,' Mahbub explained to Kim,
who laughed.

'I have heard that talk since my Sixth Day,' he replied, squatting
by the light.  'Whither does it lead?'

'To protection.  Tonight we change thy colour.  This sleeping under
roofs has blanched thee like an almond.  But Huneefa has the secret
of a colour that catches.  No painting of a day or two.  Also, we
fortify thee against the chances of the Road.  That is my gift to
thee, my son.  Take out all metals on thee and lay them here.  Make
ready, Huneefa.'

http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext00/kimrk12.txt