Read Online The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling, Alev Lytle Croutier - Free Book Online Page A

the oranges in sport to see the fruit and flowers fall. They explored all the passages and dark tunnels in the palace and the hundreds of little dark rooms, but they never remembered what they had seen and what they had not, and so drifted about in ones and twos or crowds telling each other that they were doing as men did. They drank at the tanks and made the water all muddy, and then they fought over it, and then they would all rush together in mobs and shout: “There is no one in the jungle so wise and good and clever and strong and gentle as the
Bandar-log.
” Then all would begin again till they grew tired of the city and went back to the tree-tops, hoping the Jungle-People would notice them.
    Mowgli, who had been trained under the Law of the Jungle, did not like or understand this kind of life. The monkeys dragged him into the Cold Lairs late in the afternoon, and instead of going to sleep, as Mowgli would have done after a long journey, they joined hands and danced about and sang their foolish songs. One of the monkeys made a speech and told his companions that Mowgli’s capture marked a new thing in the history of the
Bandar-log
, for Mowgli was going to show themhow to weave sticks and canes together as a protection against rain and cold. Mowgli picked up some creepers and began to work them in and out, and the monkeys tried to imitate; but in a very few minutes they lost interest and began to pull their friends’ tails or jump up and down on all fours, coughing.
    “I wish to eat,” said Mowgli. “I am a stranger in this part of the jungle. Bring me food, or give me leave to hunt here.”
    Twenty or thirty monkeys bounded away to bring him nuts and wild pawpaws, but they fell to fighting on the road, and it was too much trouble to go back with what was left of the fruit. Mowgli was sore and angry as well as hungry, and he roamed through the empty city giving the Strangers’ Hunting-Call from time to time, but no one answered him, and Mowgli felt that he had reached a very bad place indeed. “All that Baloo has said about the
Bandar-log
is true,” he thought to himself. “They have no Law, no Hunting-Call, and no leaders—nothing but foolish words and little picking thievish hands. So if I am starved or killed here, it will be all my own fault. But I must try to return to my own jungle. Baloo will surely beat me, but that is better than chasing silly rose leaves with the
Bandar-log.
”
    No sooner had he walked to the city wall than the monkeys pulled him back, telling him that he did not know how happy he was, and pinching him to make him grateful. He set his teeth and said nothing, but went with the shouting monkeys to a terrace above the red sandstone reservoirs that were half-full of rain water. There was a ruined summer-house of white marble in the centre of the terrace, built for queens dead a hundred years ago. The domed roof had half fallen in and blocked up the underground passage from the palace by which the queens used to enter, but the walls were made of screens of marble tracery—beautiful milk-white fret-work, set with agates and cornelians and jasper and lapis lazuli—and as the moon came up behind the hill it shone through the open work, casting shadows on the groundlike black velvet embroidery. Sore, sleepy, and hungry as he was, Mowgli could not help laughing when the
Bandar-log
began, twenty at a time, to tell him how great and wise and strong and gentle they were, and how foolish he was to wish to leave them. “We are great. We are free. We are wonderful. We are the most wonderful people in all the jungle! We all say so, and so it must be true,” they shouted. “Now as you are a new listener and can carry our words back to the Jungle-People so that they may notice us in the future, we will tell you all about our most excellent selves.” Mowgli made no objection, and the monkeys gathered by hundreds and hundreds on the terrace to listen to their own speakers singing the praises of