“I am Doctor Dolittle,” said the parrot—just the way the Doctor would have said it.
“What are you doing in my bedroom?” cried the King. “How dare you get out of prison! Where are you?—I don’t see you.”
But the parrot just laughed—a long, deep, jolly laugh, like the Doctor’s.
“Stop laughing and come here at once, so I can see you,” said the King.
“Foolish King!” answered Polynesia. “Have you forgotten that you are talking to John Dolittle, M.D.—the most wonderful man on earth? Of course you cannot see me. I have made myself invisible. There is nothing I cannot do. Now listen: I have come here tonight to warn you. If you don’t let me and my animals travel through your kingdom, I will make you and all your people sick like the monkeys. For I can make people well: and I can make people ill—just by raising my little finger. Send your soldiers at once to open the dungeon door, or you shall have mumps before the morning sun has risen on the hills of Jolliginki.”
Then the King began to tremble and was very much afraid.
“Doctor,” he cried, “it shall be as you say. Do not raise your little finger, please!” And he jumped out of bed and ran to tell the soldiers to open the prison door.
As soon as he was gone, Polynesia crept downstairs and left the palace by the pantry window.
But the Queen, who was just letting herself in at the backdoor with a latchkey, saw the parrot getting out through the broken glass. And when the King came back to bed she told him what she had seen.
Then the King understood that he had been tricked, and he was dreadfully angry. He hurried back to the prison at once.
But he was too late. The door stood open. The dungeon was empty. The Doctor and all his animals were gone.
VII
The Bridge of Apes
Queen Ermintrude had never in her life seen her husband so terrible as he got that night. He gnashed his teeth with rage. He called everybody a fool. He threw his toothbrush at the palace cat. He rushed round in his nightshirt and woke up all his army and sent them into the jungle to catch the Doctor. Then he made all his servants go too—his cooks and his gardeners and his barber and Prince Bumpo’s tutor—even the Queen, who was tired from dancing in a pair of tight shoes, was packed off to help the soldiers in their search.
All this time the Doctor and his animals were running through the forest towards the Land of the Monkeys as fast as they could go.
Gub-Gub, with his short legs, soon got tired; and the Doctor had to carry him—which made it pretty hard when they had the trunk and the handbag with them as well.
The King of the Jolliginki thought it would be easy for his army to find them, because the Doctor was in a strange land and would not know his way. But he was wrong; because the monkey, Chee-Chee, knew all the paths through the jungle—better even than the King’s men did. And he led the Doctor and his pets to the very thickest part of the forest—a place where no man had ever been before—and hid them all in a big hollow tree between high rocks.
“We had better wait here,” said Chee-Chee, “till the soldiers have gone back to bed. Then we can go on into the Land of the Monkeys.”
So there they stayed the whole night through.
They often heard the King’s men searching and talking in the jungle round about. But they were quite safe, for no one knew of that hiding-place but Chee-Chee—not even the other monkeys.
At last, when daylight began to come through the thick leaves overhead, they heard Queen Ermintrude saying in a very tired voice that it was no use looking any more—that they might as well go back and get some sleep.
As soon as the soldiers had all gone home, Chee-Chee brought the Doctor and his animals out of the hiding-place and they set off for the Land of the Monkeys.
It was a long, long way; and they often got very tired—especially Gub-Gub. But when he cried they gave him milk out of the coconuts, which he was very fond of.
They always had plenty to eat and drink; because Chee-Chee and Polynesia knew all the different kinds of fruits and vegetables that grow in the jungle, and where to find them—like dates and figs and groundnuts and ginger and yams. They used to make their lemonade out of the juice of wild oranges, sweetened with honey which they got from the bees’ nests in hollow trees. No matter what it was they asked for, Chee-Chee and Polynesia always seemed to be able to get it for them—or something like it. They even got the Doctor some tobacco one day, when he had finished what he had brought with him and wanted to smoke.
At night they slept in tents made of palm-leaves, on thick, soft beds of dried grass. And after a while they got used to walking such a lot and did not get so tired and enjoyed the life of travel very much.
But they were always glad when the night came and they stopped for their resting-time. Then the Doctor used to make a little fire of sticks; and after they had had their supper, they would sit round it in a ring, listening to Polynesia singing songs about the sea, or to Chee-Chee telling stories of the jungle.
And many of the tales that Chee-Chee told were very interesting. Because although the monkeys had no history-books of their own before Doctor Dolittle came to write them for them, they remember everything that happens by telling stories to their children. And Chee-Chee spoke of many things his grandmother had told him—tales of long, long, long ago, before Noah and the Flood—of the days when men dressed in bearskins
