of a thunder-cloud in the month of the rains. But the Demons had already killed the princely bird because Jatayus had tried to stop them from carrying Seeta away; so Rama, having lit the funeral pyre for his friend, went on farther, to ask the help of one who was even more powerful than the Vulture King. This was Hanuman, the son of Vargu, the chief of all the monkey nations, who held his court upon the mountain peaks by the Pampas Lake. And the sentinel apes, sitting on the topmost rocks, saw Rama approaching, and recognized him, and Hanuman himself came down towards him reverently, stepping from ridge to ridge, and led the hero up to the council-peaks, and called all the princes of the four-handed folk together to give him their advice. Hanuman himself sat apart upon a peak alone, for there was not room enough on one mountain top for both him and the rest, for to the council had come all the greatest monkey warriors. Varana, the white ape, was there, resting at full length upon a ridge, and looking like a snow-drift that rests upon the Himalayas; and there too was Arundha of the portentous tail, with the strength of a whole herd of elephants in each of his hairy arms; and there too Darviudha, that matchless baboon. And after long council it was decided that the monkey nation should be divided into four armies, and that each army should search a quarter of the universe. The southern quarter fell to Hanuman, and he linked his warriors together in long lines and they searched the whole south before them, examining the ravines among the mountains and the creeks along the seashores as narrowly as the ants search the crevices of the bark in the neem-trees; but night came on and they had not found Seeta. So she must be beyond the Black Water, the monkeys said,
