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 center 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 fretwork, 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 ground like 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 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 the
Bandar-log, and whenever a speaker stopped for want of breath they would
all shout together: "This is true; we all say so." Mowgli nodded and
blinked, and said "Yes" when they asked him a question, and his head
spun with the noise. "Tabaqui the Jackal must have bitten all these
people," he said to himself, "and now they have madness. Certainly this
is dewanee, the madness. Do they never go to sleep? Now there is a cloud
coming to cover that moon. If it were only a big enough cloud I might
try to run away in the darkness. But I am tired."