“That’s the same snake,” replied one, “that was brought here two days ago by Kibboo, and thrown away this morning because it had begun to smell.” At this Simlee grew angry, and flew at the girl with open jaws, tearing her hair and beating her face; and there would have been as hot a fight between the women as between the men and the snakes, but for the return of the warriors with their trophies, when the curiosity of the female apes, which was greater than their anger, put an end to the quarrel, and they all ran to possess themselves of the snakes for ornaments. CHAPTER VII. [Illustration] We have said that the stories of the exploits of this war have been handed down in the religion of the Apes. This is due not so much to the achievements of the heroes as to the accounts of them by Shoozoo, who was much more active in relating battles than in fighting them; so that, as the heroes of the Trojan War owe more to Homer than to their own prowess, (for many great men lived before Agamemnon, whose exploits are forgotten for want of an imaginative historian); so the heroes of the fight about Cocoanut Hill are chiefly indebted to the Homer of the Apes for his reports of them. As gods, demi-gods, heroes and fair women rose from a ten days’ skirmish on the banks of the Scamander, so divinities, good and bad, had their origin in the Cocoanut Hill battles by reason of a good telling. Shoozoo was, fortunately, unlike Homer, both warrior and historian, and so, like Xenophon and Cæsar, made himself the chief character in his accounts. The other apes nearly all drop out of history, and their deeds are ascribed to him, who at the time of this story, was deemed the chief character in that conflict; showing that for future fame a good liar is better than a good fighter. Thus the driving out of the snakes from Cocoanut Hill came in time to be wholly attributed to Shoozoo, so that, like St. Patrick, he was honored for the entire service of their expulsion. The great dragon, or flying alligator, of which he only spoke to Simlee as an excuse, was, in time, believed to have been actually killed by him, as a primitive St. George. The snake that had entered the mound of one of the apes, and gorged himself with its treasured fruits, and which was killed by the ape, was alleged to have been slain by Shoozoo while guarding great treasures in a cave, as Siegfried slew the Nibelungen dragon. The expulsion of the snakes from Cocoanut Hill found its way into various stories about a primitive pair of apes—Shoozoo and Simlee—whose fruit was stolen by snakes, for which the snakes were driven from the country; reversing the story of Adam and Eve, who took the fruit from the snake and were themselves expelled, instead of the snake. Had Adam been his own biographer, like Shoozoo, the story of Eden might have been reversed.