I looked around at all the people talking and eating. And it suddenly seemed to me that all these people were apes: chattering, masticating, perambulating, gesticulating apes. Big grotesque hairless apes, with comical tufts of hair sticking out on top. Wearing these bizarre, ritualistically colored strips of cloth. We were a big gathering of apes, like apes in the forest gathering at a tree that had dropped its fruit. The sound, I tell you, it was like the sound in the ape house, this loud, meaningless chattering. And suddenly everything seemed so comical, so ridiculous and trivial . . . so bizarre and utterly without importance . . . that I found myself leaving the room in a panic.