HIS EXCELLENCY THE PRESIDENT 137

before rebellion stirred. But they could be distracted,
too, as easily as children, and when a man presented
me with a small grey monkey on a string they were
temporarily happy again. They liked something to
torment. They poked it with sticks. They turned it
upside down. They dragged it head first in the dust.
They tickled its private parts, and the little brute
screamed at them and tried to bite and turned its
bloodshot eyes this way and that for an escape. When
they left it in peace for a moment it sat with its head
in its wrinkled hands as if it were weeping. Laminah
and Alfred were its chief tormentors, they were like
bullies at school with a new boy who couldn'.t hit
back; the other men were amused and tormented it
occasionally when they were bored, but sometimes
they were kind to it, offering it pieces of bafiana or kola
nuts, and after a while they forgot it. Even Laminah
gave up teasing it in the end, and Mark became
its companion. After the first four days it went every-
where with him; it sat on his shoulder all the way
through the forest until at Ganta it escaped; it rested
its hands on his head and searched his hair for insects.
It never tried to bite him; he never talked to it; they
accepted each other in silence.

It was eight o'clock before the men had finished
eating and were ready to start. They were very slow
and quarrelsome, and I went on ahead with my two
spare hammock-men. Alfred walked in front
dangling the monkey, and Babu walked behind carry-
ing two harps. Almost immediately we were in the
forest, but it was only the edge of the great waste of
bush which covers the Republic to within sight of the
sea. I felt rather absurd with my two companions^