leaves with the Bandar-log.
No sooner had he walked to the city wall than the monkeys pulled him
back, telling him that he did not know how happy he was, and pinching
him to make him grateful. He set his teeth and said nothing, but went
with the shouting monkeys to a terrace above the red sandstone
reservoirs that were half-full of rain water. There was a ruined
summer-house of white marble in the center of the terrace, built for
queens dead a hundred years ago. The domed roof had half fallen in and
blocked up the underground passage from the palace by which the queens
used to enter. But the walls were made of screens of marble
tracery--beautiful milk-white fretwork, set with agates and cornelians
and jasper and lapis lazuli, and as the moon came up behind the hill it
shone through the open work, casting shadows on the ground like black
velvet embroidery. Sore, sleepy, and hungry as he was, Mowgli could not
help laughing when the Bandar-log began, twenty at a time, to tell him
how great and wise and strong and gentle they were, and how foolish he
was to wish to leave them. We are great. We are free. We are
wonderful. We are the most wonderful people in all the jungle! We all
say so, and so it must be true, they shouted. Now as you are a new
listener and can carry our words back to the Jungle-People so that they
may notice us in future, we will tell you all about our most excellent
selves. Mowgli made no objection, and the monkeys gathered by hundreds
and hundreds on the terrace to listen to their own speakers singing the
praises of the Bandar-log, and whenever a speaker stopped for want of
breath they would all shout together: This is true; we all say so.
Mowgli nodded and blinked, and said Yes when they asked him a
question, and his head spun with the noise. Tabaqui the Jackal must
have bitten all these people, he said to himself, and now they have
madness. Certainly this is _dewanee_, the madness. Do they never go to
sleep? Now there is a cloud coming to cover that moon. If it were only
a big enough cloud I might try to run away in the darkness. But I am
tired.
That same cloud was being watched by two good friends in the ruined
ditch below the city wall, for Bagheera and Kaa, knowing well how
dangerous the Monkey-People were in large numbers, did not wish to run
any risks. The monkeys never fight unless they are a hundred to one, and
few in the jungle care for those odds.
37