The Paradise of Monkeys 279 
of having deceived and disappointed them. But monkeys do not nurse their grievances 
as men do. They will forgive a friend if he is penitent and make amends in due 
time, while man accepts the amends and fosters the offence. 
Four times I saw these monkeys before I reached the village, and on my arrival 
I found them in the jungle near by awaiting what they had evidently construed to 
mean my promise of a feast. I immediately took some bananas, and went to the usual 
place of meeting them, and in this manner soon repaired the breach that I had made 
in the friendship which I had so long laboured to establish. 
Along the south side of the valley of the Ogowé River, extending from the coast 
to the Nguni River, there is a chain of lakes, some of them more than twenty 
miles long, others quite small ; 
but all of them beautiful. Their 
broad surface is relieved by small 
islands, single, or in groups of 
ten or twenty each. Often they 
are only separated by a narrow 
channel, and the boughs of the 
trees that line their banks reach out 
and embrace each other. Twined 
among them are festoons of vines 
and pendants of moss reaching 
down to kiss the cool water, over 
whose calm face is spread the 
leaves and petals of yuccas and 
lihes of many sorts and sizes. 
Quietly floating in your canoe 
through those silent corridors of 
fohage, upheld by columns of ferns 
and pilasters of orchids rising in 
all the splendor of springtime, one 
feels impressed with the thought 
that this must be the frontier of 
Fairyland. Art may have dreamed 
of such a realm, but skill has not 
depicted it. But here it is no 
dream—it is a sublime reality, in 
whose presence one feels impelled 
to bend the knee of reverence. 
The spots that I have tried to 
describe are a mere glimpse of 
this Paradise of Monkeys. Among 
such scenes those light-hearted little gypsies pass them lives in endless revelry. 
Not only do the smaller kinds live here, but the gorilla, the king of apes, and the 
chimpanzee, his sagacious rival, the great mandril, and others of the baboon type. In 
no other part of the earth are found so many species of the larger kinds, nor a greater 
number and variety of all; nor is there any other part so rich in all the resources of 
food and comfort, freedom and safety for them than this great delta, where beauty and 
plenty leap the bounds of prodigality. 
Such is the Paradise of Monkeys. It is their 
lawful heritage, within whose limits every monkey 
is a freeman and every human being an alien. A C AANMNELY . 
Ss = Aa EN 
Photograph by H. Lazenby, York. 
“A PIT OF TEMPER.” 
