A great roofless palace crowned the hill, and the marble of the
courtyards and the fountains was split, and stained with red and green,
and the very cobblestones in the courtyard where the king's elephants
used to live had been thrust up and apart by grasses and young trees.
From the palace you could see the rows and rows of roofless houses that
made up the city looking like empty honeycombs filled with blackness;
the shapeless block of stone that had been an idol in the square where
four roads met; the pits and dimples at street corners where the public
wells once stood, and the shattered domes of temples with wild figs
sprouting on their sides. The monkeys called the place their city, and
pretended to despise the Jungle-People because they lived in the forest.
And yet they never knew what the buildings were made for nor how to
use them. They would sit in circles on the hall of the king's council
chamber, and scratch for fleas and pretend to be men; or they would run
in and out of the roofless houses and collect pieces of plaster and old
bricks in a corner, and forget where they had hidden them, and fight
and cry in scuffling crowds, and then break off to play up and down the
terraces of the king's garden, where they would shake the rose trees and
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.