Singhalese ladies wear only a skirt and a short waist, between which several inches of brown skin are visible
A Singhalese woman rarely misses an opportunity to give her children a bath
Try as I would, I had not succeeded in making my daily expenditures since leaving the coast more than ten cents. Near the summit of the route I paused at an amateur shop by the wayside. It was a pathetic little hovel, 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 plump, brown matron, in abbreviated skirt and a waist little more than neckerchief, was spreading out grain—with her feet—on a long grass mat. Unfortunately, the list of Singhalese words that I had jotted down at the dictation of Askins lacked the all-important term “how much.” I pointed at the fruit and tossed a coin on the counter. It was a copper piece, worth one and three-fourths cents; enough, surely, for the purchase of a half-dozen bananas. The matron approached, picked up the coin gingerly, and, turning it over and over in her hand, stared at me with wide-open eyes. Had I been niggardly in my offer? I was thrusting a hand into my pocket for another copper, when the female, motioning to me to open my knapsack, dropped into it three dozen bananas, hesitated, and, assuming the air of one whose conscience is master of his cupidity, added a fourth cluster.
A furlong beyond, in a shaded elbow of the route, I turned to the task of lightening my burden. Small success would have crowned my efforts but for the arrival of a fellow-wayfarer. He was a man of fifty or sixty, blacker of skin than the Singhalese. A ten-yard strip of cloth, of a pattern in which two-inch stripes of white and brilliant red alternated, was wrapped round his waist and fell to his knees. Over his head was folded a sheet of orange hue. In either hand he carried a bundle, wrapped in cloth and tied with green vines. The upper half of his face was that of meekness personified; the rest was covered with such a beard as one might swear by, deeply streaked with gray.
Painfully he limped to the roadside, and squatted on his heels in the edge of the shade. By every token he was “on the road.”
“Have a bite, Jack?” I invited, pushing the fruit towards him.
A child’s voice squeaked within him. Gravely he rose to his feet to express his gratitude in every known posture of the human figure except that of standing on his head. That formality over, he fell to with a will—and both hands—so willingly in fact that, with never a pause nor a choke, he made way with twenty-eight bananas. Small wonder if he would have slept a while in the edge of the shade after so noteworthy a feat.
I rose to plod on, however, and he would not be left behind,—far behind, that is. Reiterated solicitations could not induce him to walk beside me; he pattered always two paces in the rear, too mindful of his own inferiority to march abreast with a sahib. From the gestures and gasps that my questions drew forth, I gathered that he was a yogi, a holy man—temporarily at least—bound on a pilgrimage to some shrine in the mountains. Two hours beyond our meeting, he halted at a branch road, knelt in the highway, and, ere I had divined his intention, imprinted a sonorous kiss on the top of one of my Nazarene slippers. Only my dexterity saved the other. He stood up slowly, almost sadly, as one grieved to part from good company—or bananas, shook the dust of the route from his beard, and, turning into the forest-throttled byway, was gone.