Round the Wonderful World

by G. E. Mitton

When we get down near the hotel I want you to come into this jeweller's shop in the arcade; you'll see a strange sight. A crowd of tourists are sitting round a table which is covered with little heaps of shining stones, unset and piled on squares of white paper; some are brilliant blue, others flashing crimson, others sombre in hue, but showing a glitter of living light whichever way you turn them. The odd thing is that the visitors are handling them and turning them over, and examining them quite freely, while the owner, a wizened old man in horn spectacles, hardly watches!

"They're not real?"

Indeed they are! Rubies, star-sapphires, opals, and many another precious stone. That native owner has a queer faith in the honesty of his customers! Long may it last!

We are only in Colombo for one night, and to-morrow we are going up-country to stay with a friend of mine, a tea-planter.

As we are undressing you give a sudden start, "What's that?" Only a lizard scuttling over the dark-washed bedroom wall, first cousin to the chameleon you saw at Abu Simbel. He is quite harmless and lives on flies. He runs like a little shadow across the wall and sometimes he loses his balance and comes down thump on the floor, or breaks his fall on the mosquito curtains. He is one of the signs that we really are in the East; here is another. Listen for a moment at the window. There is a distant barking of dogs, a far-away crow from a defiant cock, a strange murmurous chant of men, weird cries intermingled, and now and then the deep beat of a parchment drum. The people of the land are all awake and stirring though it is late—the East never really sleeps as profoundly as does the West; there is a restlessness in the blood that stirs too much, and a pulsating warmth in the air that does not allow of deep slumber; it is the restlessness of the jungle translated into town life.

Next day at the station we find that the porters, though dressed in neat blue suits, have pronounced chignons of the same type as their brothers who draw the rickshaws, and in spite of their European-cut coats and trousers they run about with bare feet! We might make a museum of the strange porters we see on our wanderings, collecting a specimen from each country!

The train is comfortable enough and there is a luncheon-car, so we shan't starve this time; besides, the journey to Kandy is only a few hours. There I hope we shall be met, as I haven't the least idea whereabouts my friend, Mr. Hunter's, tea-plantation is; however, I sent him a wire yesterday directly we arrived to say we would come by this train, so he is sure to be there.

The line for the greater part of the way is laid on a terrace or shelf cut out of a hillside, and it winds along climbing ever up with a towering wall on one side and a precipice on the other. The little stations have hardly room to wedge in, but they are very gay with flowers—indeed the whole line is, for great yellow daisies and the terra-cotta blossoms of a pretty creeper called lantana climb everywhere. As we get higher and higher we can look down and see the country spread out before us like a map; it is cut up into neat little fields and would be like a draught-board except that the fields are often on different levels one above the other, made on land cut out from the hillsides. These people grow rice, which is to them what maize is to the Egyptian. In the fields, before it has been threshed, it is known as paddy. They live on rice and very little else, and seem to thrive on it. Rice pudding if repeated every day for a month at both breakfast and dinner would grow monotonous, but the man of the East does not find it so. His rice is not cooked with milk but with water, and is eaten with a little curry made of fish or vegetables to give it flavour.

Higher yet, and soon we see the hills laid out with rows of a tiny dark-green bush, planted as neatly as rows of turnips; this is the tea for which Ceylon is famous, and we shall get a nearer look at it presently. That and rubber are the staple crops that Englishmen come out here to raise, but they also grow coffee and other things too.