Published: Civil and Military Gazette, 28 September 1887.

Attribution: Scrapbook 3 (28/3, pp. 145–6).

Text: Civil and Military Gazette.

Notes: RK used this title twice, to the confusion of the bibliographers. This is the first instance of its use; the second is for a story published in The Week's News, 21 April 1888, and collected in Under the Deodars.

The pseudonym ‘S.T.’ is unexplained; besides its use here, it appears with ‘Jews in Shushan’, CMG, 4 October 1887 (Life's Handicap); ‘The Recurring Smash’, CMG, 13 October 1887 (uncollected); ‘The Dreitarbund’, CMG, 22 October 1887 (uncollected); and ‘The Vengeance of Lal Beg’, CMG, 3 November 1887 (The Smith Administration). No other of RK's many pseudonyms is used in such quick succession – five stories in just over a month. RK may have had some thought of establishing an identity for these initials, but, shortly after the last of the stories signed ‘S.T.’ had appeared, he left Lahore for Allahabad, and never again, so far as is known, made use of ‘S.T.’

The idea that ordinary life embodies the archetypal forms of myth and legend, though with modern twists, was familiar to RK, who never doubted that all stories, no matter how new in appearance, were always old stories. As he wrote of ‘The Man Who Would Be King’, ‘all “King” tales of that kind date back from the tower of Babel’ (to Edward Lucas White, 3 January 1893: Letters, ii, 77); in another letter he wrote that ‘the blessed streets and squares and groves of today are shouting aloud the ancient tragedies’ (to Brander Matthews, 7 February 1905, Letters, iii, 176). See also the poem ‘The Craftsman’ (The Years Between).

‘The Hill of Illusion’ was reprinted in the Kipling Journal, December 2007.

When the Pandavs held their last Council on the summit of aged Jacatala they laid a blessing upon the mountain so honoured; and, though the Pandavs have long since fought their way into Heaven, and a meaner generation has taken possession of Jacatala, defiling it with smoke and sewage, and calling it Jakko, the blessing remains.