Karabouffi the First, warned of my arrival by the chattering of my custodians, rushed up to me. The sight of the hated baboon made me feel timid, more timid, indeed, than usual, and what added in some degree to my fear was seeing him covered from head to foot with feathers. The sight of this ape, transformed as it were, to all appearances, into a bird, naturally enough filled me at first with great surprise. But having examined him more attentively, I perceived that the thousands of feathers under which his hairy skin seemed to have disappeared were writing-quills, which he stuck under his arms, upon his ears, in his mouth, and even up his nose, as well as fastened all over his wrinkled skin. In moving towards me some of the feathers fell out, and I noticed that most of them had been made into pens. The two ourang-outangs who accompanied him, and who appeared to be his prime ministers, were covered, like their master, from head to foot with feathers.
Karabouffi preceded me into the principal room, which it seems he had left in order to receive me; and there I saw a hundred sapajous in a state of intense nervous excitement, and apparently very busy, sprawling over desks, dipping their pens and very often their hands into inkstands without number, and scribbling upon sheets of paper laid before them—imitating, in fact, the copying-clerks in the public offices at Macao. They worked as if by steam; the pens scratched incessantly, and sheets after sheets of paper flew about in all directions.
When one of these sheets of paper was sufficiently scratched and scrawled over it was passed to some more venerable sapajou, who signed it, and in his turn passed it on to some sapajou still more grave-looking, who again signed the paper and fixed his seal to it. Being afterwards handed to one of the crowd of sapajous who waited outside, the paper was transmitted without loss of time from sapajou to sapajou placed at certain distances, precisely as I had seen them when they were occupied in throwing wood into the furnace, into which I had had a narrow escape of being thrown myself. After a lapse of something like ten minutes, the paper which had traversed the island by means of this telegraphic system of communication came into Karabouffi’s hands, who, after having applied it to the purposes of a pocket-handkerchief, handed it over to an old mangabey, whom he had invested with the dignity of Keeper of the Court Records.
It was very evident to me that these savage creatures, after the departure, flight, or perhaps extermination of the English colony, had taken possession of all the official paper and pens which they could find, and of the vice-admiral’s seal; and that, in servile imitation of what they had so frequently witnessed, they were despatching at random orders from all sides, thereby, without intending it, offering a witty comment on the ordinary practice of European bureaucracy, that pest of civilisation which devours time, money, and men, and invariably terminates by a paper with which, were we accustomed to paper pocket-handkerchiefs like the Japanese, the last receiver of it might just as well wipe his nose for any better use he could put it to.
Karabouffi, in the most imperious way, threw in my face several quires of paper and several parcels of quills. The expressive look which he afterwards gave me implied, as I imagined, that I was to occupy myself without uttering a word with these packets of pens and quires of paper, precisely like his other clerks, who were working away at such a desperate rate before my eyes.
During three times twenty-four hours I was not permitted either to leave my place or to let my pen rest. I was compelled under pain of all that is terrible to blacken ream after ream of paper, and when the virgin whiteness of these sheets had entirely disappeared under the clouds of ink with which I overlaid them, one of the strange scribes at my elbow took the papers from me and gave them, as I have already described, to a corps of apes, charged with the duty of conveying them round the island. For seventy-two hours I did not get even a wink of sleep, since my enemies, endowed for the most part with the faculty of seeing in the dark, whenever I was about to succumb to slumber, cruelly pinched my arms, pulled my hair, kicked me in the back, or scratched my face with their sharp claws, so as to keep me wide awake. What horrible torture!
Oh, how sincerely at this moment did I pity those numbers of young men condemned by the misfortune of their birth or the stupidity of their relations to spend their lives in doing nothing but ply their pens from morning to evening within the four walls of some dreary office!
