CHAPTER XII
THE REALMS OF GAUTAMA
Difficult, indeed, would it be to choose a more striking introduction to the wonderland of the Far East than that egg-shaped remnant left over from the building of India. How incomplete and lusterless seems the picture drawn by the anticipating imagination when one stands at last in the midst of its prolific, kaleidoscopic life! Sharp and vivid are the impressions that come crowding on the traveler in jumbled, disordered succession, and he experiences a confusion such as comes with the first glance at a great painting. He must look again and again before the underlying conception stands out clearly through the mass of unfamiliar detail.
It would have been strange if the white man of peripatetic mood had not found his way to this Eden of the eastern seas. Within ten minutes of my landing I was greeted by a score of “beachcombers” gathered in the black shade under the portico of a large government building. In garb, they were men of means. It costs nothing worth mentioning to keep spotless the jacket and trousers of thinnest cotton that make up the wardrobe of the Indias. More than their sun-baked faces, their listless movements and ingrown indolence betrayed them as “vags.” Those of the band who were not stretched out at full length on the flagging of the veranda dangled their feet from the encircling railing or leaned against the massive pillars, puffing lazily at pipe or cigarette. On the greensward below, two natives sat on their heels before portable stands, rising now and then to pour out a glass of tea for the “comber” who tossed a Ceylon cent at their feet.
Theoretically, the party had gathered to seek employment. The morning hour, since time immemorial, had called the exiles together in the shade of the shipping office to lay in wait for any stranger, the “cut of whose jib” stamped him as a captain. “Shipping,” however, was dull. Imbued with the habit, “the boys” continued to gather, but into their drowsy yarning rarely intruded the fear of being driven forth from this island paradise.
Now and again some energetic member of the band rose to peer through the open door of the shipping office; yet retreated hastily, for a roar as of an angry bull was the invariable greeting from within. When courage came, I ventured to glance inside. A burly Englishman, as nearly naked as a mild sense of propriety permitted, lay on his back in a reclining chair, on the arm of which he threw a mass of typewritten sheets every half-minute, to mop up the perspiration that poured down his rotund face and hairy chest in spite of the heavy velvet punkahs that swung slowly back and forth above him.
“Shippin’ master,” volunteered a recumbent Irishman behind me. “But divil a man dast disturb ’im. If you valy your loife, kape out of ’is soight.”
At noonday the office closed. The beachcombers wandered languidly away to some other shaded spot, and seeking refuge from the equatorial sun in a neighboring park, I dreamed away my first day’s freedom from the holly-stone. A native runner roused me towards nightfall and thrust into my hands a card setting forth the virtues of “The Original and Well-Recognized Sailors’ Boarding House of Colombo, under Proprietorship of C. D. Almeida.” It was a two-story building in the native quarter of Pettah, of stone floor, but otherwise of the lightest wooden material. The dining-room, in the center of the establishment, boasted no roof. Narrow, windowless chambers of the second story, facing this open space, housed the seafaring guests.
Almeida, the proprietor, was a Singhalese of purest caste. His white silk jacket was modestly decorated with red braid and glistening brass buttons. Beneath the folds of a skirt of gayest plaid peeped feet that had never known the restraint of shoes, the toes of which stood out staunchly independent one from another. For all his occupation he clung stoutly to the symbols of his social superiority—tiny pearl earrings and a huge circle comb of celluloid. Fate had been unkind to Almeida. Though his fellow-countrymen, with rarely an exception, boasted thick tresses of long, raven-tinted hair, the boarding master was well nigh bald. His gray and scanty locks did little more than streak his black scalp, and the art of a lifetime of hair dressing could not make the knob at the back of his head larger than a hickory nut. Obviously no circle comb could sit in position so insecure; at intervals as regular as the ticking of his great silver watch, that of Almeida dropped on the ground behind him. Wherever he moved, there slunk at his heels a native urchin who had known no other task in many a month than that of restoring to its place the ornament of caste.
An outrigger canoe and an outdoor laundry in Colombo, Ceylon