down
into the jungle to try and make my way up the opposite side where the other
monkeys had fallen. It was dangerous work, for the rocks were covered with
a thin layer of earth which supported a dense growth of vegetation. If I
tried to let myself down a steep slope by clinging to a thick fern it would
almost invariably strip away with a long layer of dirt and send me
headlong.

After two bad falls I reached the bottom of the ravine where a mountain
torrent leaped and foamed over the rocks and dropped in a beautiful cascade
to a pool fifty or sixty feet below. The climb up the opposite side was
more difficult than the descent and twice I had to return after finding the
way impassable.

A sheer, clean wall almost seventy feet high separated me from the spot
where the gibbons had fallen. I skirted the rock face and had laboriously
worked my way around and above it when a vine to which I had been clinging
stripped off and I began to slide. Faster and faster I went, dragging a
mass of ferns and creepers with me, for everything I grasped gave way.

I thought it was the end of things for me because I was hardly ten feet
above the precipice which fell away to the jagged rocks of the stream bed
in a drop of seventy feet. The rifle slung to my back saved my life.
Suddenly it caught on a tiny ragged ledge and held me flattened out against
the cliff. But even then I was far from safe, as I realized when I tried to
twist about to reach a rope of creepers which swung outward from a bush
above my head.

How I managed to crawl back to safety among the trees I can remember only
vaguely. I finally got down to the bottom of the canon, but felt weak and
sick and it was half an hour before I could climb up to the place where my
wife was waiting. She was already badly frightened for she had not seen me
since I left her an hour before and, when I answered her call, she was
about to follow into the jungle where I had disappeared. We left the two
monkeys to be recovered from above and went slowly back to camp.

The gibbons of Ho-mu-shu are quite unlike those of the Nam-ting River. They
represent a well-known species called the "hoolock" (_Hylobates hoolock_)
which is also found in Burma.

The males, both old and young, are coal black with a fringe of white hairs
about the face, and the females are light brown. Their note is totally
unlike the Nam-ting River gibbons and, instead of sitting quietly in the
top of a dead tree to call to the