Page:Under the Sun.djvu/133

Rh forward with the crash of a thunderbolt against Rama. But Rama was immovable, and, standing upright among the dead, he loosed a great bolt, and Ravana’s soul fled to Yama, where it floats in the River of the Dead. Then the monkeys destroyed the city of the Demons, and escorted Rama back to India; and Sushena, the magician ape, made the stone bridge sink again; and Rama went back again with his wife to Ayodhya, and the monkey people back to their merry hills by the Pampas Lake.

This is surely a splendid episode in the history of a people; and the monkeys of to-day are the lineal descendants of those very monkeys that fought for Rama. There is no gap in the long descent, and to-day the inheritors of Hanuman’s fame inherit also his sanctity, sharing in the East the abodes and property of men, and possessing besides many temples of their own.

Yet the monkeys are not proud. They will condescend quite cheerfully to eat the Hindoo’s humble stores of grain and fruit put out for sale on the village stall; and when these fail, in consequence perhaps of the grain-dealer’s miserly interference, they will fall to with an appetite upon the wild berries and green shoots of the jungle, or even pick a light luncheon off an ant-hill. No, there is no pride about them, but much gravity and sadness of face, induced, perhaps, hy the recollection of their classical glories and a consciousness of the present decadence of their race.

The ape in Æsop wept copiously on passing through a cemetery. “What ails you, my friend?” asked the fox, affected by this display of grief. “Oh, nothing,” was the reply of the sensitive creature, “but I always weep like this when I am reminded of my poor dead ancestors!”