I saw in Southwark, at St. Margaret's fair, monkeys and apes dance, and do other
feats of activity, on the high rope; they were gallantly clad à la mode, went upright, saluted
the company bowing and pulling off their hats, they saluted one another with as good a grace,
as if instructed by a dancing-master; they turned heels over head with a basket having eggs
in it, without breaking any; also, with lighted candles in their hands, and on their heads, with-
out extinguishing them, and with vessels of water without spilling a drop.
THE FISH
John Evelyn, Diary
Mowgli had never seen an Indian city before, and though this was almost a heap of
ruins it seemed very wonderful and splendid. Some king had built it long ago on a little
hill... The monkeys called the place their eity, and pretended to despise the Jungle People
because they lived in the forest. And yet they never knew what the buildings were made for
nor how to use them. They would sit in eireles on the hall of the king's council-chamber, and
scratch for fleas and pretend to be men; or they would run in and out of the roofless houses
and collect pieces of plaster and old bricks in a corner, and forget where they had hidden
them, and fight and cry in scuffling crowds, and then break off to play up and down the ter-
races of the king's garden, where they would shake the rose-trees and the oranges in sport to
see the fruit and flowers fall. They explored all the passages and dark tunnels in the palace
and the hundreds of little dark rooms; but they never remembered what they had seen and
what they had not, and so drifted about in ones and twos or crowds, telling one another that
FROM "THE FISH"
they were doing as men did. They drank at the tanks and made the water all muddy, and then
they fought over it, and then they would all rush together in mobs and shout: "There are
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
none in the jungle so wise and good and elever and strong and gentle as the Bandar-log."
Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book
Only by comprehending our monkey nature can we have any idea as to why man has
surpassed the other animals. Monkeys are dominated by a master passion for monkeying -
by an avid curiosity. Man possessed this to a greater degree than the other monkeys, and he
has, therefore, outdistanced his simian relatives.
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
- It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
James Harvey Robinson, The Human Comedy
Elizabeth Bishop
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