6 The Call of the Red Gods 
At that moment the first monkey leapt; there was a 
splash of foliage in the tree below, the branch, lightened of 
a portion of its load, recoiled, and as it came down again 
the second monkey sprang into the air, hands and feet 
neatly gathered together. And so they went on, the 
monkeys leaping one by one from the branch end as it 
swung up and down, till there was but one left, the branch 
by this time see-sawing to within a short distance of the 
goal. Down went the last of them, tail streaming out 
behind, and away into the jungle after his companions, who 
had by this time swung themselves out of sight. 
But it was now time for me to move on in pursuit of 
my caravan, and leaving the naturalist to superintend his 
coolie gangs, I went my way, eyes very wide open, trying 
to see more monkeys. 
No event worth recording took place till the fifth night, 
when the harmony of the evening was temporarily inter- 
rupted owing to the exceedingly bellicose attitude of the 
innkeepers at Chiu-cheng who, with unusual singleness of 
purpose, one and all refused to admit me. Eventually I 
was driven to seek shelter beneath the roof of the village 
school house, and can testify that here they look upon 
education with an indulgent eye, since the fact that I 
might annex endless school books did not weigh heavily 
with them in comparison with the fact that they did not 
desire my presence within their homes. It occurred to me 
that I was now beginning to feel the full force of Chinese 
displeasure over the Pien-ma incident on the frontier, but 
subsequent events caused me to modify this view con- 
siderably. 
By this time we had left the river gorge and the teak 
forests behind us, and down in the open valley, where the 
Taping flows between extraordinarily bare treeless hills, we 
had rain, and the road rapidly resolved itself into a quag- 
mire, which the peasants were diligently adding to by 
dredging their rice fields and dressing the track with the 
semi-liquid slime. 
It is but eight mule stages from Bhamo to T’eng-yueh, 
and the road is sufficiently well known to require no 
detailed description here; but I was destined to meet with 
a small mishap on the eighth day when, starting early in 
