The other great staple of Cinghalese life is rice. Kalua’s family rice-fields lay below us in larger patches along the bottom of the glen, and terraced in narrow strips a little way up the hill at the head of it. The rice-lands are, for irrigation’s sake, always laid out in level patches, each surrounded by a low mud bank, one or two feet high; sometimes, where there is water at hand, they are terraced quite a good way up the hillsides, something like the vineyards in Italy. During and after the rains the water is led onto the various levels successively, which are thus well flooded. While in flood they are ploughed—with a rude plough drawn by humped cattle, or by buffalos—and sown as the water subsides. The crop soon springs up, a brilliant green, about as high as barley, but with an ear more resembling oats, and in seven or eight weeks is ready to be harvested. Boiled rice, with some curried vegetable or coco-nut, just to give it a flavor, is the staple food all over Ceylon among the natives—two meals a day, sometimes in poorer agricultural districts only one; a scanty fare, as their thin limbs too often testify. They use no bread, but a few cakes made of rice-flour and ghee and the sugar of the chágeri palm.
The brothers’ cabin is primitive enough—just a little thatched place, perhaps twelve feet by eight, divided into two—a large wicker jar or basket containing store of rice, one or two boxes, a few earthenware pots for cooking in, fire lighted on the ground, no chair or table, and little sign of civilisation except a photograph or two stuck on the wall and a low cane-seated couch for sleeping on. The latter however is quite a luxury, as the Cinghalese men as often as not sleep on the earth floor.
We stayed a little while chatting, while every now and then the great husked coco-nuts (of which you have to be careful) fell with a heavy thud from the trees; and then Kalua came on with us to Kandy, and we went to see the great Buddhist temple there, the Devala Maligawa, which contains the precious tooth-relic of Buddha.
BUDDHIST PRIEST.
(Librarian at the Temple at Kandy, with palm-leaf MS. book in lap.)
Architecturally nothing, the temple is interesting for the antique appearance of its gardens, shrines, priests’ cottages, library, fishponds, etc.; sacred fish and turtles coming to be fed by the pious; rude frescoes of the infernal torments of the wicked, not unlike our mediæval designs on similar subjects; the sacred shrine itself with ivory and silver doors; the dirty yellow-stoled priests arriving with huge keys to open it, but first washing their feet in the forecourt; the tomtoms and horns blowing; flowers scattered about; and then the interior chamber of the shrine, where behind strong bars of iron reposes a golden and bell-shaped cover, crusted with jewels—the outermost of six successive covers, within the last of which is the tooth itself (reported by Emerson Tennent to be about two inches long, and probably the fang of a crocodile!); then the little golden and crystal images of Buddha in various little shrines to themselves; and, most interesting of all, the library with its old MS. books written on strips of talipot palm leaf, beautifully done in Cinghalese, Pali, Sanskrit, etc., illuminated with elegant designs, and bound by silk cords in covers of fretted silver. The old librarian priest was a charming specimen of a Buddhist priest—gentle, intelligent, and apparently with a vein of religious feeling in his character—and spoke with interest about the various texts and manuscripts. It is a pity that so much cannot be said of the Buddhist priests generally, who are as a rule—in Ceylon at any rate—an ignorant, dirty, betel-chewing and uninviting-looking lot.
At the botanical gardens at Peradeniya—three or four miles out of Kandy—we saw a specimen of the talipot palm in full flower. This beautiful palm—unlike the coco palm—grows perfectly erect and straight; it flowers only once, and then dies. Haeckel says that it lives from fifty to eighty years, and that the blossom is sometimes thirty or forty feet long. The specimen that we saw in blossom was about forty-five feet high in the stem; and then from its handsome crown of huge leaves sprang a flower, or rather a branched spike of numerous white flowers, which I estimated at fifteen feet high (but which I afterwards saw described in the newspapers as twenty feet high). Baker says that the flower bud is often as much as four feet long, and that it opens with a smart report, when this beautiful white plume unfolds and lifts itself in the sun. The natives use the great leaf of the talipot—which is circular and sometimes eight or nine feet in diameter—as an umbrella. They fold it together along its natural corrugations, and then open it to ward off sun or rain.
GENERAL VIEW OF KANDY.