These Baboons are quite as clever as the great Dog-faced kind, which has been immortalised by the ancient Egyptians, and every now and then troops of both come in contact and have great fights. The Gelada Baboon, with its long tail tufted at the end, and black limbs, has very long hair on its upper parts of a pale brown colour. This covers the head where there is a dark line from the forehead backwards, and also the shoulders and rump. This Baboon, moreover, has the nostrils opening high up in the face, and not close to the end of the upper jaw, as in the Hamadryas. Differing thus from the Hamadryas Baboons, each troop soon knows its comrades. Occasionally, when the fields are ripe with grain, the Geladas, perched upon their mountain homes, see the glowing and varied colours of the vegetation, and long for the luxuries of the plains. They descend and sometimes rob the farmers with impunity, and return after having committed a vast amount of mischief. But it happens that the great Dog-faced troops are out on the same errand, and the two sets of thieves speedily disagree. A fight ensues, and the Geladas roll down large stones, which the others try to avoid, and then they all rush together to close quarters, making a great uproar, and fighting with great fury. Some of these gallant Geladas had the audacity to stop a Serene Highness in his travels in Abyssinia, and very effectually, for some hours. A Duke of Coburg-Gotha was in a caravan which had to traverse the pass of Mensa, in Abyssinia, and as there were some of the Baboons perched in numbers on the sides of the high rocky ravine, some of the Europeans, who of course must try and kill something as often as possible, fired upon them. The Baboons retaliated in a most military manner, by rolling down stones in such quantity and of such a size that not only had the firing party to retire, but the passage of the caravan was stopped. They positively closed the pass against all comers for some time. Darwin tells a laughable anecdote of a Baboon, but does not mention the kind. He saw in the Zoological Gardens a Baboon who always got in a furious rage when his keeper took out a letter or book and read it aloud to him; and his rage was so violent that, as Mr. Darwin witnessed, on one occasion he bit his own leg till the blood flowed. THE PIG-TAILED BABOON, OR CHACMA.[63] The Hottentots are familiar with one of the largest kinds of the Baboons, which reaches the size of an English Mastiff, and has superior strength, and they call it the T’chackamma, which has been reduced by Europeans to the “Chacma.” The colonists of the Cape of Good Hope districts called it the Black Ape, and then, from some fanciful resemblance of its tail to that of a Pig, the creature was dignified with the name _porcarius_.