But Marimonda is the captain’s monkey; she has been his property, his favorite, his flatterer!  In the disposition of mind in which Selkirk finds himself, he does not need these thoughts to make him pitiless.  Marimonda reminds him of Stradling; the monkey shall pay for the man!

He lowers his gun, and fires.  The monkey has seen the movement and divined his intentions; she has only time to retreat behind her tree, which does not prevent her receiving in her side a part of the charge.

This detonation of fire-arms, the first perhaps which has resounded in this corner of the earth since the creation of the world, as it is prolonged from echo to echo, even to the highest mountains, awakens in every part of the island as it were a groan of distress.  Instinct, that sublime prescience, has revealed to all that a great peril has just been born.

To the cries of affright from birds of every species, to the uneasy and distant bleating of the goats, succeeds a plaintive moaning, like the voice of a wailing infant.

It is Marimonda lamenting over her wound.

At nightfall, after an entire day of walks and explorations, Selkirk is returning to his grotto on the shore, when he sees a stone fall at his feet, then another.

While he, astonished, is seeking to divine the direction from which this invisible battery plays, a little date-stone hits him on the cheek.  He immediately hears as it were a joyous whistling in the foliage, which is agitated at his right, and sees Marimonda leaping from tree to tree, using for this movement her feet, her tail, and one hand; for she holds the other to her side.  It is a compress on her wound.

War is already in the island!  Selkirk has a declared enemy here!  And this island, is it deserted?  He has just traversed it in every direction without seeing any thing which betokens the existence of a human being.

His disaster is then complete; henceforth not a doubt of it can exist.  And yet his forehead wears rather the character of hope and fortitude than of discouragement; it is more than resignation, it is pride.

He has just visited his empire.  The island, irregular in form, is from four to five leagues in length; in breadth it is from one and a half to two leagues.  This abode to which he is condemned, is the most enchanting retreat he could have chosen; a luxuriant park cradled upon the waves.

If sometimes, in the mountainous parts, he has encountered sterile and rugged rocks, even abysses and precipices, they seem to be placed there only as a contrast to the fresh and green valleys which encircle them.  If he has seen some dark, dense, inaccessible forests, entangled in the thousand arms of interwoven vines, he has not discovered a single reptile.