Page:Myths of the Hindus & Buddhists.djvu/43

 wisdom, able at a word to make the leafy branches blossom into beauty, and yet unhappy strugglers with their own hot monkey-nature, ever imposing on them, like a spell, a strange unspeakable destiny of mischief and futility.

It is an organized society, this, that is predicated by the Indian imagination of the animal races. They have their families and genealogies, their sovereigns and political alliances, and their personal lot of tragedy or comedy. Throughout the dramatic phases of the Ramayana the counterplot is provided by the five great monkeys whom Sita sees below her, seated on a hill-top, when she is being borne through the evening sky by Ravana. Of these the chief is Sugriva, of the monster neck, who has lost wife and kingdom at the hands of his elder brother Bali, and waits to be avenged on him. Sugriva is thus a king in exile, surrounded by his counsellors and captains, in a sense the enchanted prince of fairy-tales. There are scholars who find in this tableau of the five chief monkeys on the mountain-top a fragment of some ancient cosmog ony, already, it may be, a score of millenniums old.

Hanuman But there moves through the Ramayana one being who, though also a monkey, is of a different order. In those parts of India where, as in the Himalayas or the interior of Maharashtra, the symbols of primitive Hinduism still abound, little chapels of Hanuman are as common as those of Ganesha, and the ape, like the elephant, has achieved a singular and obviously age-old conventionalism of form. He is always seen in profile, vigorously portrayed in low relief upon a slab. The image conveys the impression of a complex emblem rather than of plastic realism. But there is no question as to the energy and beauty of the