The bachelors kept apart, absorbed
in their athletic exercises, performed for the most part with the
ends of their tails. One of them, especially, attracted our
attention by dividing his amusement between sauts perilleux and
teasing a respectable looking grandfather, who sat under a tree
hugging two little monkeys. Swinging backward and forward from
the branch, the bachelor jumped at him, bit his ear playfully and
made faces at him, chattering all the time. We cautiously passed
from one tree to another, afraid of frightening them away; but
evidently the years spent by them with the fakirs, who left the
island only a year ago, had accustomed them to human society. They
were sacred monkeys, as we learned, and so they had nothing to fear
from men. They showed no signs of alarm at our approach, and,
having received our greeting, and some of them a piece of sugar-cane,
they calmly stayed on their branch-thrones, crossing their arms,
and looking at us with a good deal of dignified contempt in their
intelligent hazel eyes.
The sun had set, and we were told that the supper was ready. We
all turned "homewards," except the Babu. The main feature of his
character, in the eyes of orthodox Hindus, being a tendency to
blasphemy, he could never resist the temptation to justify their
opinion of him. Climbing up a high branch he crouched there,
imitating every gesture of the monkeys and answering their
threatening grimaces by still uglier ones, to the unconcealed
disgust of our pious coolies.
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