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Updated: June 6, 2025
The common monkey of India, the Bengal monkey, is found in large companies at low elevations. The Himalayan monkey is abundant from 3,000 to 6,000 feet; and the Himalayan langur frequents the zone from 7,000 to 12,000 feet. The tiger inhabits the Terai at the foot of the mountains, but is only an occasional visitor to Sikkim proper.
Perhaps he was afraid but yet they could remember a certain day in the bamboo thickets, when a great, wild buffalo had charged their camp and Langur Dass acted as if fear were something he had never heard of and knew nothing whatever about. One day they asked him about it.
Langur looked at them out of his dull eyes, and evaded their question just as long as he could. "Have you forgotten the tales you heard on your mothers' breasts?" he asked at last. "Elephants are of the jungle. You are of the cooking-pots and thatch! How should such folk as ye are understand?" This was flat heresy from their viewpoint.
They smoked their cheroots, and waited for Ahmad Din to speak. "You have all heard?" he asked at last. All but one of them nodded. Of course this did not count the most despised one of them all old Langur Dass who sat at the very edge of the shadow. His long hair was grey, and his youth had gone where the sun goes at evening. They scarcely addressed a word to him, or he to them.
Silver-haired langur apes, the white fringes around their black faces giving them a comic resemblance to aged negroes, awoke the echoes of the mountains with their deep booming cry; while in the lower valleys little brown monkeys mopped and mowed from the trees at the fugitives as they passed.
The species which we killed at the Nam-ting River camp, like all others of the genus Pygathrix, was interesting because of the long hairs of the head which form a distinct ridge on the occiput. We never heard the animals utter sounds, but it is said that the common Indian langur, Pygathrix entellus, gives a loud whoop as it runs through the tree tops.
He would hear the wild tuskers trumpeting in the jungles a very long way off, and all the myriad noises of the mysterious night, and at such times even his mother looked at him with wonder. "Oh, little restless one," Langur Dass would say, "thou and that old cow thy mother and I have one heart between us. We know the burning we understand, we three!"
Solitariness doesn't improve their dispositions, and they were generally expelled from a herd for ill-temper to begin with. "Woe to the fool prince who buys this one!" said the grey-beard catchers. "There is murder in his eyes." But Langur Dass would only look wise when he heard these remarks. He knew elephants.
"Tell us, Langur Dass," they asked, mocking the ragged, dejected looking creature, "If thy name speaks truth, thou art brother to many monkey-folk, and who knows the jungle better than thou or they? None but the monkey-folk and thou canst talk with my lord the elephant. Hai! We have seen thee do it, Langur Dass. How is it that when we go hunting, thou art afraid to come?"
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