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