Receiving this rebuke and no sympathy from me, she could not think
of anything better than drawing out the Babu, who, for a wonder,
had managed to keep quiet till then.
"What do you say to all this? I for one am perfectly confident that
no one but the disembodied soul of a great artist could have painted
that lovely view. Who else is capable of such a wonderful achievement?"
"Why? The old gentleman in person. Confess that at the bottom
of your soul you firmly believe that the Hindus worship devils.
To be sure it is some deity of ours of this kind that had his
august paw in the matter."
"Il est positivement malhonnete, ce Negre-la!" angrily muttered
Miss X - -, hurriedly withdrawing from him.
The island was a tiny one, and so overgrown with tall reeds that,
from a distance, it looked like a pyramidal basket of verdure. With
the exception of a colony of monkeys, who bustled away to a few mango
trees at our approach, the place seemed uninhabited. In this virgin
forest of thick grass there was no trace of human life. Seeing the
word grass the reader must not forget that it is not the grass of
Europe I mean; the grass under which we stood, like insects under
a rhubarb leaf, waved its feathery many-colored plumes much above
the head of Gulab-Sing (who stood six feet and a half in his stockings),
and of Narayan, who measured hardly an inch less. 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. 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.
As the last golden ray disappeared on the horizon, a gauze-like
veil of pale lilac fell over the world. But as every moment
decreased the transparency of this tropical twilight, the tint
gradually lost its softness and became darker and darker. It
looked as if an invisible painter, unceasingly moving his gigantic
brush, swiftly laid one coat of paint over the other, ever changing
the exquisite background of our islet. The phosphoric candles of
the fireflies began to twinkle here and there, shining brightly
against the black trunks of the trees, and lost again on the silvery
background of opalescent evening sky. But in a few minutes more
thousands of these living sparks, precursors of Queen Night, played
round us, pouring like a golden cascade over the trees, and dancing
in the air above the grass and the dark lake.
And behold! here is the queen in person. Noiselessly descending
upon earth, she reassumes her rights. With her approach, rest and
peace spread over us; her cool breath calms the activities of day.
Like a fond mother, she sings a lullaby to nature, lovingly wrapping
her in her soft black mantle; and, when everything is asleep, she
watches over nature's dozing powers till the first streaks of dawn.
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