78 THE FORESTS OF UPPER INDIA 



certainly a weird and uncanny sort of jungle. There 

 were troops of great black-faced monkeys, langurs — the 

 biggest and most human-like with snow-white beards and 

 hair — which swung from branch to branch by their long 

 prehensile tails, and grinned and scoffed at us with hollow- 

 sounding roars. We did not see the wild men's homes, but 

 one very poor-looking, black, lean man came and pointed 

 us out the best track. He certainly had not much in 

 the way of clothing, and carried a diminutive kulhari, or 

 axe, with which he was ingeniously scooping out a piece 

 of hard timber into something resembling a bowl. He said 

 it was to boil water in. He certainly looked the nearest 

 thing to what Darwin would collect as a specimen of a 

 link in the chain of ape-begotten humanity. He talked, 

 however, Hindustani, or what passed for that language ; 

 and being asked if he had ever seen a monkey light a fire 

 and cook his food he replied, with quite an intelligent 

 smile, as if he was not going to be humbugged, that only 

 man could cook food. 



At last, towards nightfall, we came to camp in a charm- 

 ing grassy dell, where a clear stream ran swiftly among 

 beds of lovely flowers, and then tumbled into space over 

 a flat ledge of rock into the valley below. Opposite, at the 

 head of a great amphitheatre of precipices,* the fine snow- 

 peak of Chipula towered above our heads. It was a 

 lovely evening and a beautiful spot. There was a water- 

 fall shooting down opposite off a similar ledge of rock : 

 by counting the seconds and watching a particular spot 

 in the white water descend to the bottom, I made the 

 height 1,900 feet. The strata happened here to be lying 

 nearly horizontally, with bands of harder rock which was 

 hollowed underneath and protruded all round the circus 

 like a cornice. We pitched our small tent here and 

 * Like the Cirque de Gavarnie, but in capital letters. 



