Inch-long coils of brown muck plopped down onto his cap and shoulders, and there was a general agitation. He looked up to see Sir Galahad grinning down at him and he smiled back. Placidly he turned to close and lock the door, pocketing the key because he knew they were clever. Returning his gaze to the room, he stared down forty sets of eyes, some bored, some mysterious, some animated and some amused, some indifferent. None hostile, he knew. Didn’t he feed them, play with them, and listen to them? And he would free them soon too, not long now, free to return to their trees and bushes—but of course he couldn’t express that to them, that being the whole point of the experiment.
         He brushed off the stool, and himself, and sat at the desk, taking his notebook, pen, inkwell and whip from his coat pockets and setting them in front of him. He gently slapped a stray paw away from his tools and made the familiar noises that he knew meant an agreement to calmness.
         Then he only watched and listened.
         After some while the monkeys ignored him (excepting one or two stray swatted paws from the Doctor and the Secretary), and they went about their business. There was a dispute in the branches of a potted tree, resulting in multiple sounds, many of which he has heard or thinks he has heard before, some new or indecipherable, some perhaps just variations. He considers, and makes notes.
         Some passing of fruit, and grooming. Then, some luck! They rarely feel unembarrassed enough to mate in front of him and he does the occasion honor by sitting as still as possible, only writing in the notebook when he wants to record some new subtlety of sound. This is a shriek of pleasure certainly, but does it also have a further significance? A name or a noun? And the exultant male, are his vocalisations only animal gruntings such as any man would make, or are they obscenities of the monkey order?
         They ate and played and mated. They crawled over his hair and shat into his pockets. They allowed him to tickle them and at other times they bit him, hard enough that at first he had worn leather gloves in their company, but the smell of the gloves seemed to disturb them and so ere long he left them behind and only tried to keep his fingers curled up as much as possible in their presence.
         On occasion he would allow them into the dining room, where they sat in their chairs, mostly politely, as his servants brought them food and drink. Captain Scott joined them on one occasion and was delighted. Look at the serious one! he said. Ah, he’s the Chaplain, is he? And this saucy fellow. Don John? Ha ha ha ha!
         When his regiment received their new orders, he freed the monkeys as planned. Many of them, in particular the small silky one that he jokingly called his wife, seemed reluctant to leave. He had pierced her ears and ornamented them with small pearls, which she sported with great pride—but he knew that they would only attract unwanted attention in the jungle so he removed them, his wife screeching and pleading all the while. Eventually he shooed them all away into the jungle, returned to his desk and wept.
         Listlessly he leafed through his small lexicon. This sound [here was a particular style of notation that he had invented to describe the monkey-sounds] is the word for MALE. This sound, the sound for FEMALE. These the sounds for ANGER, FEAR, FOOD, AMUSEMENT, LOVE/COITUS and so on; a sound that was an ACTIVITY VERB, a sound that was an ACCEPTANCE VERB; a glottal click that meant UNDERSTANDING—this, the small vocabulary of his last few weeks, a total of sixty words in all. A respectable start.
         Later, when he had time, he would embark to expand upon this, and so to bridge the gulf of speech between monkey and man. Why not? He had a gift for languages and in his span would learn almost thirty of them.
         Seventeen years later this lexicon, and all his journals from this period, were lost in a fire.
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