Note 3 — Tale II. (continued 2)

Apes enter frequently not only into the fables but into the epic poetry of India. The Ramajana, narrating the spreading of the Aryan Indians over the south and far-east, speaks of the country as inhabited by apes, and of Rama taking apes for his allies; also, on one occasion, of his re-establishing an ape-king in possession of his previous dominions. Consult Lassen, Indische Alterthumskunde, i. 534, 535. Megasthenes mentions various kinds of apes and monkeys, with, however, scarcely recognizable descriptions, in his enumeration of the wild animals of India (Fragm. x. p. 410). Kleitarchos tells that when Alexander had reached a hill in the neighbourhood of the Hydaspes, he came upon a tribe of apes arranged in battle array, looking so formidable that he was about to give the signal for attacking them, but was withheld by the representations of Taxiles, king of the neighbouring country of Taxila, who accompanied him (Fragm. xvi. p. 80). The Pantcha-Tantra contains a fable in which the King of Kamanapura establishes an ape for his bodyguard as more faithful and efficient than man; a thief, however, brings a serpent into the apartment, and at sight of the mortal enemy of his kind, the ape runs away. Another fable of the same collection tells of a Brahman who, having succeeded in rearing a flourishing garden of melons, found them all devoured as soon as ripe by a party of apes, nor was he able by any means to get rid of them. One day he laid himself down hid amid the leafage as if he had been dead, but with a stick in his hand ready to attack them when they approached. At first they indeed took him for dead and were venturing close up to him, when one of them espied the stick and cried to the others, “Dead men do not carry arms,” and with that they all escaped; and it was the same with every trap he laid for them, by their wariness they evaded them all.