I rose to continue my way, but the natives burst out begging me to stay, and, sending three boys on some unknown errand, squatted about me again and fell to preparing new chews of betel-nuts. The boys soon returned, one carrying a jack-fruit, another a bunch of bananas, and the third swinging three green cocoanuts by their rope-like stems. The leader laid the gifts, one after another, at my feet. Two men with jungle knives sprang forward, and, while one hacked at the hard jack-fruit, the other caught up a cocoanut, chopped off the top with one stroke, and invited me to drink. The milk was cool and refreshing, but the meat of the green nut was as tough as a leather strap. The jack-fruit, which looked much like a watermelon, was at last split into long slices. These in turn split sidewise into dozens of parts like those of an orange. The meat itself was white and rather tasteless. The bananas were small, but delicious. When I had sampled each of the gifts, I distributed them among the givers and turned down to the highway.
Night had no terrors for me in Ceylon. When it grew too dark for tramping, I had only to lie down on the grass under my feet, sleep peacefully in the warm breeze that blew over me, and rise refreshed with the new dawn.
I was twenty miles from the city when I rose from my first forest lodging and set out on my second day’s tramp before the country people were astir. Now and then the road left the encircling palm trees and crossed a small rolling plain. I came upon little villages with every mile—rambling two-row hamlets of bamboo. Between them lonely cottages with roofs made of grasses and reeds peeped from beneath the trees.
As the sun climbed higher, grinning groups of countrymen pattered by. Half the houses along the way offered the fruits of the forest and tea and cocoanut cakes for sale. Before every hut, however wretched, stood an earthenware vessel of water, beside which hung, for use as a drinking-vessel, the half of a cocoanut-shell. So I did not have to go hungry or thirsty long at a time.
Bathing seemed to be the national sport of Ceylon. Every stream I passed was alive with splashing natives. Mothers, walking from one village to another, halted at every stream to roll a banana leaf into a cone-shaped bucket and pour gallons of water on their sputtering babies, crouched naked on the bank. Travelers on foot or by oxcart took a dip every hour or so along the way. The farmer left his plowing often to plunge into the nearest water-hole. His wife, instead of calling on her neighbors, met them at the brook, and gossiped with them as she splashed about in cool and comfort. The men, wearing only a loin-cloth, paid no attention to their clothing. The women, wound from their knees to their arms in sheets of snowy white, came out of the water, and after turning themselves round and round in the blazing sunshine, marched home in dry garments.
On the third day I came to foot-hills covered with tea plantations. Beyond these hills the highway climbed up some low mountains. At the top I paused at a little wayside shop built of rubbish picked up in the forest. A board, stretched like a counter across the open doorway, was heavily laden with bananas. Near at hand a brown woman was spreading out grain with her feet. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to ask my friends at the Sailors’ Boarding House the Singhalese words for “How much?” I pointed at the fruit and tossed on the counter a coin. It was a copper piece worth one and three fourths cents—enough surely, to pay for half a dozen bananas, I thought. The woman carefully picked up the coin, and, turning it over and over in her hand, stared at me with wide-open eyes. Had I been stingy? I was thrusting my hand into my pocket for another copper, when the woman motioned to me to open my knapsack. Then she dropped into it three dozen bananas, paused a moment thoughtfully, and added another bunch.
The yogi who ate twenty-eight of the bananas at a sitting.
A short distance beyond, I sat down in the shade and began eating the fruit in order to lighten my burden. An old man, blacker than anybody I had met that day, came wandering past. A strip of cloth covered with red and yellow stripes was wrapped round his waist and fell to his knees. Over his head was folded a sheet of orange color. In each hand he carried a bundle tied with green vines. The upper part of his face looked shy. The lower half was totally covered with a heavy tangled beard deeply streaked with gray.
He limped painfully to the roadside, and squatted on his heels at the edge of the shade. Plainly, he too was “on the road.”