From a distance
it looked like a waving sea of black, yellow, blue, and especially
of rose and green. On landing, we discovered that it consisted of
separate thickets of bamboos, mixed up with the gigantic sirka reeds,
which rose as high as the tops of the mangos.
It is impossible to imagine anything prettier and more graceful
than the bamboos and sirka. The isolated tufts of bamboos show,
in spite of their size, that they are nothing but grass, because
the least gush of wind shakes them, and their green crests begin
to nod like heads adorned with long ostrich plumes. There were
some bamboos there fifty or sixty feet high. From time to time
we heard a light metallic rustle in the reeds, but none of us
paid much attention to it.
Whilst our coolies and servants were busy clearing a place for
our tents, pitching them and preparing the supper, we went to pay
our respects to the monkeys, the true hosts of the place. Without
exaggeration there were at least two hundred. While preparing
for their nightly rest the monkeys behaved like decorous and well-
behaved people; every family chose a separate branch and defended
it from the intrusion of strangers lodging on the same tree, but
this defence never passed the limits of good manners, and generally
took the shape of threatening grimaces. There were many mothers
with babies in arms amongst them; some of them treated the children
tenderly, and lifted them cautiously, with a perfectly human care;
others, less thoughtful, ran up and down, heedless of the child
hanging at their breasts, preoccupied with something, discussing
something, and stopping every moment to quarrel with other monkey
ladies--a true picture of chatty old gossips on a market day,
repeated in the animal kingdom.
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