The Call of the Red Gods 5 
thus bringing to a focus, as it were, the days which are 
past and all that lies before one in the new world. Espe- 
cially is this the case on the return journey, when the 
hardships are over. Never shall I forget the thrill of joy 
which quickened me when I crossed the Yunnan-Burma 
frontier on January 1, nearly a year later, and looked back 
down the vista of months spent far from our heritage in 
the East. It was not that the future seemed much brighter 
than the past, for never had I enjoyed myself more; not 
that I found the efforts of a Public Works Department— 
erect telegraph poles and taut wires, reliable bridges, mile 
posts, and rest-houses provided by a paternal government— 
filling a long-felt want; but simply that the act of crossing 
our own frontier again, with all that that frontier stood for, 
made my heart throb a little more quickly. 
A few miles farther I was surprised to see an English- 
man sitting in the doorway of a hut on the mountain side, 
smoking a pipe, and closely watching some fifty coolies 
who were busily engaged in mending the road. 
I of course stopped for a chat and soon discovered that 
my companion was a keen naturalist, years of lonely watch- 
ing while engaged on such work as this having made him 
extraordinarily observant, and quick to detect the slightest 
movement. Mr Oliver, for such was his name, asked 
me if I had seen any monkeys, and on my replying in the 
negative, he merely said: ‘Then watch that tree.” 
I looked down the mountain slope in the direction 
indicated to a strapping forest giant that spread aloft a 
great canopy of branches hanging above the road, and 
waited. One minute, two minutes; not a leaf stirred; the 
forest was silent and seemingly deserted; not even the 
tinkle of a stream disturbed the profound quiet. And then 
suddenly, as though a breath of air had sighed over the 
jungle, a shiver seemed to pass through the branches of the 
tree, and almost immediately a brown shadow appeared out 
of the foliage, ran along a branch which swayed dizzily, and 
crouched ; he was followed by another, and another, and yet 
others, now plainly visible, and still the branch swayed rhyth- 
mically as it became more and more depressed. ‘“‘Phayre’s 
leaf-eating monkey” (Semnopithecus Phayret), said my 
companion shortly; “watch them travel from tree to tree.” 
