In the Library
The Monkey and the Crocodile
Unknown, 300 BCE
- Form
- Form Short Story
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 5 minutes
- Translated by
- Translated by Arthur W. Ryder (1925)
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 2k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
For then I might have brought with me another heart, very sweet indeed, which I keep in a hole in the rose-apple tree.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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Journey to the West
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Sun Wukong is the monkey trickster grown to legend, talking and tricking his way out of every demon's jaws on the long road west.
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About the book
On the shore of the sea stands a rose-apple tree that is never without fruit, and in its branches lives a monkey who tosses the ripest down to a crocodile sunning on the sand below. Day after day they share the harvest until they are friends, chatting away the afternoons. Then the crocodile carries a few of those sweet fruits home, and his wife, tasting them, decides that a creature nourished on such sweetness must keep a heart sweeter still, one she will starve herself rather than live without. So the crocodile invites his trusting friend onto his back and swims him out over deep water, where friendship ends and appetite begins. All the monkey has now is his wits. This little tale traveled out of ancient India across twenty centuries and half the world, and everywhere it went it taught the same thing: that flattery is never free, that a smiling face can carry another's hunger, and that a quick mind outlasts a strong jaw.