Dravot, disguised as a mad priest, and Carnehan, as his servant, will go to the unexplored region armed with twenty Martini-Henry rifles and their British military knowledge.

In an attempt to prove that they are not crazy, they show the narrator a contract they have drawn up between themselves which swears loyalty between the pair and total abstinence from women and alcohol until they are kings.

He is a broken man, a crippled beggar clad in rags who has trouble staying focused, but he tells an amazing story: he says he and Dravot succeeded in becoming kings.

They traversed treacherous mountains, found the Kafirs, mustered an army, and took over villages, all the while dreaming of building a unified nation or even an empire.

[2] Kafiristan was recognized as a real place by at least one early Kipling scholar, Arley Munson, who in 1915 called it "a small tract of land in the northeastern part of Afghanistan," though she wrongly thought the "only source of information is the account of the Mahomedan traders who have entered the country.

The disappearance of Kafiristan was so complete that a 1995 New York Times article referred to it as "the mythical, remote kingdom at the center of the Kipling story.