"I wish to eat," said Mowgli. "I am a stranger in this part of the
jungle. Bring me food, or give me leave to hunt here."

Twenty or thirty monkeys bounded away to bring him nuts and wild
pawpaws. But they fell to fighting on the road, and it was too much
trouble to go back with what was left of the fruit. Mowgli was sore and
angry as well as hungry, and he roamed through the empty city giving the
Strangers' Hunting Call from time to time, but no one answered him, and
Mowgli felt that he had reached a very bad place indeed. "All that Baloo
has said about the Bandar-log is true," he thought to himself. "They
have no Law, no Hunting Call, and no leaders--nothing but foolish words
and little picking thievish hands. So if I am starved or killed here,
it will be all my own fault. But I must try to return to my own jungle.
Baloo will surely beat me, but that is better than chasing silly rose
leaves with the Bandar-log."

No sooner had he walked to the city wall than the monkeys pulled him
back, telling him that he did not know how happy he was, and pinching
him to make him grateful. He set his teeth and said nothing, but
went with the shouting monkeys to a terrace above the red sandstone
reservoirs that were half-full of rain water. There was a ruined
summer-house of white marble in the center of the terrace, built for
queens dead a hundred years ago. The domed roof had half fallen in and
blocked up the underground passage from the palace by which the
queens used to enter. But the walls were made of screens of marble
tracery--beautiful milk-white fretwork, set with agates and cornelians
and jasper and lapis lazuli, and as the moon came up behind the hill it
shone through the open work, casting shadows on the ground like black
velvet embroidery. Sore, sleepy, and hungry as he was, Mowgli could not
help laughing when the Bandar-log began, twenty at a time, to tell him
how great and wise and strong and gentle they were, and how foolish he
was to wish to leave them. "We are great. We are free. We are wonderful.
We are the most wonderful people in all the jungle! We all say so, and
so it must be true," they shouted. "Now as you are a new listener and
can carry our words back to the Jungle-People so that they may notice us
in future, we will tell you all about our most excellent selves." Mowgli
made no objection, and the monkeys gathered by hundreds and hundreds on
the terrace to listen to their own speakers singing the praises