"I was a private in the army," Ernest says. "In Gibraltar, you do your duty starting at age eighteen. I would come up here and help name the monkeys and look after them...Now I have been with the monkeys since nineteen-fifty-four."

"So the Government of Gibraltar officially takes care of them?" Jane asks.

“Oh yes. They are given immunizations and each are named and catalogued. We also feed them and give them medical examiniations. In the old days, the army doctors brought them in for treatment, and examined them one by one."

Caring for the monkeys is not all tourism and show. It is perhaps vital for the people of Gibraltar. Spain - which itself stubbornly refuses to give up its stake in two chunks of the Moroccan mainland, insists that Gibraltar is rightfully Spanish. I ask, "What do you think will happen to Gibraltar in the long run?”

"In two weeks, our foreign ministers are meeting. The foreign minister of Britain is going to Spain and they are expected to make some progress on the subject of our sovereignty. The thing is that we want to be at peace with the Spanish. If the British ever leave, we don't want to go to Spain. We want to be our own people. We will not be ruled by Spain! We are our own nationality. Everybody on Gibraltar believes in our autonomy. We like the British but if they leave we want to be a sovereign state."

"Isn't it true," I say, "that nobody has ever found an ape skeleton on the peninsula?"

Ernest folds his arms and grasps his chin. "Yes, this is true," he says. "Maybe when they go down the cliffs at night they climb into a big hole, and when they think they are going to die, they just stay there. It is believed that the apes created a giant underground burial site, maybe there is a cave. In the nineteen-fifties, there was a very special monkey to the British soldiers. He was called Jocko, and he was very large. When he died they wanted to find his body for a proper burial, and so they looked all over the cliffs but they never found him."

"But how hard can it be to find a hole in the ground, you would think somebody would try to find it." I say.

"Believe it, people are looking for the burial site all the time," he says. Although Gibraltar is tiny, most of it is dense scrub-trees on bare, steep rock. Human exploration of much of the rock is impossible, even by an experienced climbing team.

"Okay," I ask, "what would happen if all the apes of Gibraltar perish?"