It’s from “Kim”. Each verse begins a new chapter of the book, which is perhaps why most people haven’t seen the poem in one piece. (Mark Twain said that he reread “Kim” once a year because it reminded him so accurately of India, the only country which he had any desire to revisit after his world tour.)

Kipling gets a bad rap, I think. Most people don’t know that he spoke Hindustani almost before he spoke English. Nehru said that no Westerner understood India better.

About your Navajo liturgy, though: I think that it’s on a much lower level than the highest pagan beliefs, for example those of Buddhism and Zoroastrianism. Notice how the liturgy posits a deity which, for no apparent reason, has given pain and which will take it away only if adequately bribed. The higher paganisms have no trouble distinguishing between what we would call gods and devils, a distinction seemingly lost on men in mankind’s childhood.

Oh ye who tread the narrow way
By Tophet flare to Judgment Day,
Be gentle when the heathen pray
To Buddha at Kamakura.

For he who will, from pride released,
Condemning neither creed nor priest,
Will hear the soul of all the East
About him at Kamakura.

Yea, voice of every soul that clung
To the wheel of life from rung to rung
When Devadatta’s rule was young,
The warm wind brings Kamakura.

Fantastic, yes? (Kamakura is in Japan. Viewers of “Around the World in 80 Days” will remember the giant statue of Buddha, from which the famished Cantiflas steals an offertory apple.)