The city of Colombo is well spread out. Though I set off early next morning, it was nearly noon when I crossed the Victoria bridge at Grand Pass and struck the open country. Great was the contrast between the Ceylon of my imagination and the reality. A riot of tropical vegetation spread out on every hand; in the dense shadows swarmed naked humans uncountable. But jungle was there none, neither wild men, nor savage beasts. Every acre was producing for the use of man. The highway was wide, well-built as in Europe, close flanked on either side by thick forests of towering palm trees. Here and there, bands of coolies repaired the roadway, or fought back the aggressive vegetation with ax-like knives. Clumsy, broad-wheeled bullock carts, in appearance like our “prairie schooners,” creaked by behind humped oxen ambling seaward at a snail’s pace. Under his protecting roof, made, not of canvas, as the first glimpse suggested, but of thousands of leaves sewn together, the scrawny driver grinned cheerily and mumbled some strange word of greeting. Even the heat was less infernal than I had anticipated. The glare of sunshine was dazzling; a wrist uncovered for a moment was burned red as with a branding-iron; my face shown browner in the mirror of each passing stream; but often are the sun’s rays more debilitating on a summer day at home.
In the forest the slim bamboo and the broad-leafed banana tree abounded; but the cocoanut palm predominated. In every grove, prehensile coolies, armed with heavy knives, walked up the slender trunks, and, hiding themselves in the tuft of leaves sixty feet above, chopped off the nuts in clusters of three. One could have recited a poem between the moment of their launching and the time when they struck the soft, spongy earth, to rebound high into the air. ’Tis a national music, the dull, muffled thump of cocoanuts, as reminiscent, ever after, of dense, tropical forests as the tinkle of the donkey bell of Spain, or the squawk of the water wheel of Egypt.
I stepped aside from the highway in the mid-afternoon, and lay down on a grassy slope under shielding palms. A crackling of twigs drew my attention, and, catching sight of a pair of eyes filled with mute wonder, I nodded reassuringly. A native, dressed in a ribbon and a tangle of oily hair, stepped from behind a great drooping banana leaf and advanced with faltering steps. Behind him emerged a score of men and boys, as heavily clothed as the leader; and the band, smiling like a company of ballet dancers en scène, moved forward hesitatingly, halting frequently to exchange signs of mutual encouragement. Their timidity was in strange contrast to the boisterous or menacing attitude of the Arab. One felt that a harsh word or a gesture of annoyance would have sent these deferential country-folk scampering away through the forest. A white man, whatever his station in life, is a tin god in Ceylon.
With a simultaneous gurgle of greeting, the natives squatted in a semicircle at the foot of the knoll on which I lay, as obsequious in manner as loyal subjects come to do homage to their cannibal king. We chatted, intelligibly if not glibly, in the language of signs. My pipe aroused great curiosity. When it had burned out, I turned it over to the leader. He passed it on to his companions, each and all of whom, to my horror, tested the strange thing by thrusting the stem halfway down his throat and sucking fiercely at it. Even when they had examined every other article in my knapsack, my visitors were not content, and implored me with tears in their eyes to give them leave to open my kodak. I distracted their attention by a careful inspection of their tools and betel-nut pouches. With truly Spanish generosity they insisted on presenting me with every article that I asked to see; and then sneaked round behind me to carry off the gift while I was examining another.
I rose to continue my way, but the natives burst out in vigorous protest, and, despatching three youths on some unknown errand, dropped again on their haunches and fell to preparing new chews of betel-nut. The emissaries soon returned, one carrying a jack-fruit, another a bunch of bananas, and the third swinging three green cocoanuts by the rope-like stem. The leader laid the gifts, one after another, at my feet. Two men armed with jungle knives sprang forward, and while one hacked at the adamantine jack-fruit, the other caught up a cocoanut, chopped off the top with one stroke, and invited me to drink. The milk—the national beverage of Ceylon—was cool and refreshing, but the meat of the green nut as inedible as a leather strap. The jack-fruit, of the size and appearance of a water melon, was split at last into longitudinal slices. These, in turn, split sidewise into dozens of segments not unlike those of the orange, each one containing a large, kidney-shaped stone. The meat itself was white, coarse-grained, and rather tasteless. The bananas were smaller, but more savory than those of the West Indies. When I had sampled each of the gifts, I distributed them among the donators, and turned down to the highway.
It is easy to account for the vagabond’s fondness for tropical lands. He loves to strut about among reverential black men in all the glory of a white skin; it flatters him astonishingly to have native policemen and soldiers draw up at attention and salute as he passes; he adores, of course, the lazy indolence of the East. But all these things are as nothing compared with his one great advantage over his brother in northern lands. He escapes the terror of the coming night. Only he who has roamed penniless through a colder world can know this dread; how, like an oppressive cloud, rising on the horizon of each new day, it casts its gloom over every niggardly atom of good fortune. In the north one must have shelter. Other things which the world calls necessities the vagrant may do without, but the night will not be put off like hunger and thirst. In the tropics? In Ceylon? Bah! What is night but a more comfortable day? If it grows too dark for tramping, one lies down in the bed under his feet and rises, refreshed, with the new dawn.
From my forest lodging bordering the twenty-first mile post, I set out on the second day’s tramp before the country people were astir. The highway, bursting forth from the encircling palm trees now and then, stalked across a small, rolling plain. Villages rose with every mile, rambling, two-row hamlets of bamboo, where elbow room was ample. Between them, isolated thatched cottages peeped from beneath the trees. Here were none of the densely-packed collections of human stys so general in Italy and the land of the Arab; for Ceylon, four centuries tributary to Europe, knows not the fear of marauding bands.
As the sun climbed higher, grinning groups of rustics pattered by, the men beclouted, the women clad in a short skirt and a shorter waist, between which glistened ten inches or more of velvety brown skin. Hunger and thirst come often in the tropics, but never was highway more liberally stocked with food and drink. Half the houses displayed for sale the fruits of the surrounding forest, and tea and cocoanut cakes could be had anywhere. On a bamboo pedestal before every hovel, however wretched, stood an earthenware chettie of water, beside which hung as a drinking-vessel the half of a cocoanut-shell; commonly slimy and moss-grown. Great was the joy of every family whose hut I entered—silent joy, generally, for the unhoped-for honor of welcoming a white man left one and all, from the half-naked wife to the babe in arms—no household lacked the latter—speechless with awe and veneration. They are charming children, these smiling brown people, and industrious, though moving always after the languid manner of the tropical zone.
Bathing is the national hobby of Ceylon. Never a stream crawling under the highway but was alive with splashing natives. Mothers, plodding along the route, halted at every rivulet to roll a banana leaf into a cone-shaped bucket and pour uncounted gallons of water on their sputtering infants, crouched naked on the bank of the stream. Travelers on foot or by bullock cart took hourly dips en route. The husbandman abandoned his tilling at frequent intervals to plunge into the nearest water hole. His wife, instead of calling on her neighbors, met them at the brook and, turned mermaid, gossiped in cool and comfort. The men, subjected only to a loin cloth, gave no heed to their clothing. The women, wound from knees to armpits in gossamer-like sheets of snowy white, emerged from their aquatic couches and, turning themselves round and round in the blazing sunshine like spitted fowls over a fire, marched homeward in dry garments.
With the third day the landscape changed. The slightly rolling lowlands of the coast gave way to tea-clad foothills, heralding the mountains of the interior. The highway, mounting languidly, offered noonday vista of the ranges that have won for Ceylon the title of “Switzerland of the tropics.” Here were none of the rugged peaks and crags of the Alps nor the barren wilderness of Palestine. Endless, to the north and south, hovering in a sea-blue haze, stretched rolling mountains, thick clothed in prolific vegetation. Unaggressive, effeminate they seemed, compared with northern highlands; summits and slopes a succession of graceful curves, with never an angular stroke, hills plump of contour, like Ruben’s figures.